Create Realistic Looking Forests & Mountains in Blender

1. Course Trailer: This course will teach you how to create realistic looking forests, lakes, mountains, lender. A lot of people, when they tried to create realistic looking environments, they end up with a results looking like this. I don't want you to get such results and my mission is to help you with that. Throughout this course, you will learn how you can create a super realistic looking environment using the ANT landscape add-ons that comes with Blender. At first, we will start by studying some real life references because it will be our guide to achieving a photo-realistic result. Then you will learn how to generate an infinite number of formations like mountains and lakes. Using the ANT landscape add-on, we will dive deeply into how it works and we will explain it in depth so that you can use it in the future easily. After that, we will move to shade our scene. And here you will learn all about nodes, where they are, how they work and talk to each other, and how to use PBR materials to have a photorealistic environment. And after these videos, you will never have to struggle with working with nodes again in the future. Then you will learn how to scatter different nature assets that comes with these scores to fill out our environment even more. And we will be doing this using geometry nodes. Even if you're thinking that geometry nodes are complicated, this course will give you a solid introduction to the core concepts of it and how you can actually implement it in your own work. I promise you that this course will make you fall in love with the geometrically nodes. The last part of this course will be all about how to finalize your scene, how to lie at it at a sky. Add background details without increasing your render time. Add some atmospheric depth, best render settings. Positing handle more. Not only when you finish this course, you will end up with a solid understanding of how to make your environments looks so epic in gorgeous. But you will learn along the way some really valuable tricks and workflows that you won't find anywhere else. And that will take your 3D skills to the next level. So even though this course might sound like it is just about 3D environments, it is just a topic that will help you understand a lot of techniques and workflows. The course is built from the ground up to suit whatever your level in Blender, we will explain everything in detail so that you understand exactly what we're doing. And most importantly, why in the first place, this course is not just about showing you the buttons to hit, but most importantly, why am doing whatever I'm doing and what is my thought process behind it, which I think is the most valuable skill that you can develop. So basically the scores, is it really tasty, pastor for all the beginners out there with some spicy sauce on top for the ones looking for more advanced techniques. And who wants to take their 3D renders to the next level? There is a value in this course, no matter your level, and simply, it will blow your mind. Now, if all of that sounded exciting for you, believe me, the scores will be a huge investment in your 3D skills that you will not regret. And I can't wait to see you inside the course enough for me for this video. And it is time to start our journey, my friends and go. Now. 2. Studying Refrences: Our imagination is really bad when it comes to drawing things from memory. So that's why you always need references for this project. I assembled a couple of references, which will be my guide to creating the render I have in mind. So first things first here, how I'm imagining the scene to be basically, I will have definitely the, some sort of this image. We will have a long line of trees somewhere in the background. And also a lake probably will be in the foreground. But I'm going to add some trees also maybe in the foreground to frame the entire shot. And the biggest difference will be there. And i'm, I'm actually planning to add some mountains in the background, just like in this picture. And also these are some other references I might use in case I want to cover these mountains with trees. But yeah, for my main inspiration, I'm going to look at this, this, and this, and for the texture of the water or how the water is supposed to look like. I'm going to heavily rely on this image because it doesn't have a clear, let's say texture for how real water is looking like. And you will be surprised actually, how easy to achieve a similar looking water without doing any sort of like crazy simulation or crazy shading or any of that. It is actually pretty simple and we will be doing that in this course. And yeah, these are basically my main inspiration of how I'm imagining this render to be. So buckle up and let's start our journey. My friends. 3. Scene Preparation: Hello and welcome inside of Blender. And in this video, we will prepare the software for all the work that we will be doing. One important thing I want to mention is that I will be using the three-point to Alpha version, which is by the time of recording this video, it is the most recent version. It is not a stable one because based on what I know, the latest stable version is the 3.1. But you will be also able to follow even using the 3 or even a 3.1. So don't worry about the version because I'm trying to make the scores as future as possible. And that means at least always using the latest version possible. So yeah, as long as you are from 3 and above, you would be ready to go. So let's just select General. And the first thing I'm gonna do is basically to delete this light and cubed x and delete. And after doing this, let's change a couple of render settings right here. And actually before I do that, one of the comments that I received is that because my screen is so huge, all of these icons are pretty small. So that's why I'm going to Edit Preferences. Now, don't follow me in this and I'm going to change the scale to something like 1.1. And I think by doing this, the icons and all the words will be more readable. Let's help doing this in the rendering engine. I'm going to choose cycles in the feature set. I will leave it as supported. Or actually let's change it to experimental because we might need some adaptive sampling for the CPU. I'm going to change it to a GPU compute. Of course, if you have a graphic card, make sure to change to GPU compute so that you have fast renderers for the viewport. I'm going to change it to something like 30 to uncheck noise threshold. I don't need it. And for the render, I'm going to leave it for now as 4096, we will be changing at later for the light paths, as you probably know, 12, I always say that is a little bit overkill. So our drop it down by third, which means it will go to eight. Other than that, that's it for the rendering settings in the format. I'm going to choose 2560, which is the cinema scope aspect ratio that I used along this course. Make sure to check render region and crop to render region so that the only part that will be rendered is what inside the frame for the frame rate, leave it at 24, even though I don't think that we will be creating an animation, but just in case for the end, Let's choose 240. And for the output settings, I'm not going to change anything in here because we will be doing all of that later when we use the composite or for that in the render passes, I'm only going to check the denoising data. And maybe later on, I will also choose the mess because we might need to add a little bit of fog, but for now, we'll be good just by using denoising data. Let's check the properties of our camera perspective. 50 millimeter. 50 millimeter is a good number. But I think because we're doing some sort of a landscape photography, we will need a little bit of a wider lens. So that's why I'm going to choose the 35 millimeter lens for the end. Let's bring it up to something like 10 thousand meter because there are certain extent we'll all be working in a real life scale. So it will be good if we bring this number for the background images. Nothing here, let's say viewport display. Make sure to bring this passport to something like one. So basically if I hit 0 in the 3D view port, this number will basically control how dark these areas are. And to be honest, it is a little bit too distracting what it is at 0.5. So I always like to bring it up to one. So I only can see what's inside this frame, which basically means what the camera will see. It will make your life easier when trying to set up the shot and all of that just rotate to exit the camera view. And what I'm gonna do right now is to jump to the world properties. And from here on the surface, as you probably know, blender right now is using this color as an HDRI for this scene. If I jump to the rendered view, it is basically this gray color that is acting like an HDRI, the environment color. So make sure to go to color and choose environment texture, everything will turn purple because basically we don't have an image plugged in. And basically all we have to do is to go to open. And right here in the Materials folder, you will find this fruits and rise. So make sure to double-click on it. And yeah, this is our HDRI right now. Some people might find it distracting to always see it and surprise. And one of these people, so I'm going to the render tab and under a film, make sure to check this transparent so we only see the effect of the HDRI without basically bothering ourselves to see the actual background of the HDRI. Alright, so after doing this, I'm going to change a little bit the UI of lenders so it suits my needs. The first thing, I don't like this bar right here, so I'm going to right mouse button and show tool settings. I'm going to hide it because they don't need it and it is just taking some useful space that I will need. I'm going to jump back to this solid view. And also I'm going to change this from the timeline to the shader editor. And I'm going to take it a little bit down because they don't need it now. That probably will need a pretty quick later on, so yeah, it will be already ready right here for me waiting to be used. And the last thing that I want to mention, even though I remember mentioning in the first videos of their scores, which are the, as I mentioned, we will be using the a and T landscape along this chapter. So make sure to Edit Preferences and from here, make sure to Jim to Add-ons. And from here make sure to look for a point, end point T landscape, make sure to activate this add-on add mesh. Ant landscape also enable another add-on which was called sapling add-on, which is this one right here, AD curve sampling tree Jan, which is an add-on that we will use later to create our trees. So yeah, make sure to save your preferences from here. For me it is autosave, so make sure to save them, and I will close this, make sure to save your file. And right now we're ready to start working on this environment. So I will see you in the next video where we will create the mountain. See you there. 4. Using A.N.T Landscape to Create The Mountain: Hello and welcome. In this video, where we will basically start by creating the mountain. So first things first, let's just go Shift a and Andromache. You will find landscape. Of course you will not have that option if you didn't activate the ANT landscapes. So please make sure to activate it. And here's what you will notice. You will have this formation that looks like a mountain. Right here on the bottom, you will find this panel, which if you click on it to expand it, you will be shocked with all of these different settings right here. A lot of people will find the a and T landscape pretty scary. But actually instead of looking at all of these different settings, wondering what are they supposed to do. It is a pretty good if we understand the basics of how this add-on works. And simply, this add-on will generate a noise which will look something like this. And then we'll automatically use it to displace a plane. And that's why if you look right here, you will find a tab called noise settings, which is responsible for controlling the look of that noise. And then another tab called Display Settings, which is responsible for how the final result will look like for displacing the plane. That noise texture generated right here. And all of these different settings are either related to changing the look of the noise, which are all of these settings right here, which we'll go over them pretty quickly. And the other settings are related to the displacement, which basically means the way this add-on will use the noise texture to displace our plane. You see pretty simple after all, Let's just jump to the top. And right here you will find plenty of different presets from some abstract shapes like these ones do like some really useful style. For example, like the dunes, which I think would be a good idea if you apply this shader we created in the first chapter on these ones, just an idea out there. And of course you will find plenty of different things like lakes, mountains, mountains, planets, all of those stuff the ANT landscape will be able to create. In our case, we need to create a mountain. So that's why I'm going to choose either mountain one which will look something like this or mountain to, but based on my experience, I think that mountains do is we'll give you a smoother result. And what I want in our shot is basically to have really rigid look to our mountain. So that's why I'm going to stick mountain one which will look something like this. After all of that you will have right here something called name. So I'm going to change it for example, two main mountain, this is unnecessary, but I like to keep things organized, subdivision x and subdivision y, which basically means how much they add on. We'll subdivide that Blaine by default, it will always use 128, but I think it is a pretty low Ras to be honest. And that's why I'm going to crank this number to something like 256, which will give you way better result and more rigid look to our mountain. One small thing I want to mention, the more you add subdivisions, the slower the adult will become and the slower your scene will become an actually the ANT landscape tend to slow down your view port and the entire scene drastically, which actually might crash the software. And in that case, you can cry hopelessly in the corner. After that you will have the mesh size x and y. We will leave them at two, but they are kind of explanatory the size of this whole thing in the x-axis and the y-axis. And right here you will, we will go to the most important settings, in my opinion, which are the nose settings, which will allow you to shave this mountain the way you want. And right here you will have plenty of different types of noises. For example, the reg multi fractal, which is the one we're using right now. We'll give you this kind. They're really edgy, more defined edges like you're seeing right now. But if you go, for example, to something like hetero terrain, it will give you these kind of formation that is really suited for things like hills. But for our case, we will be using the reg multi fractal because it is exactly the result we're looking for. But please feel free to experiment with all of these different things right here. And to be honest, an entire course can be made around the anti landscape. But I think the best way for you to learn about all of these is basically to just experiment with them. But yes, make sure to set it up to reg multi fractal for the noise basis, you will also have plenty of different presets. For example, right now it is using a blender. For example, if we choose Voronoi F4 to look something like this, which I don't know what can be used for. The point is the ANT landscape does have the millennia of presets that you can choose from. And it is really powerful add-on that you will enjoy playing with. It's so much for the offset x and offset y, it will basically control the position of the underlying texture. So look at this. Basically it will control the position of the noise texture. In our case, I will leave it at 0, size x, and size-wise, which will basically control the underlying texture or the underlying noise texture. Which means that if we scale it a little bit. This mountain will start to become a little bit more flat. So just as an example, if we bring these two numbers to something like two, notice that the mountain became way more flat. But in our case, I will leave them at one because that's exactly what I want for the noise size. Also, it is going to self-explanatory the overall size of the noise texture for the environment that we will be creating. I'm going to drop it down to something like 0.8, which will give you a result that looks somehow like this. This depth setting will control basically the number of the frequencies of the noise texture, which to be honest, I try playing with this number. And what I noticed is that any number above eight, we will not do almost anything. For example, right now, it is set to eight. If I bring it to 12, which was the default number, almost nothing will happen. So I will basically just to save some memory, I'm going to drop it to eight and I know nothing changed. And that's the point. After that you will have dimension which basically will control the fractal dimension of the roughest areas. We're talking about these areas right here. So in my case, I'm going actually to drag this number a little bit up to something like 1.2. And this will just make them a little bit more edgy, let say, for the lack of clarity which will control the gap between the successive frequencies. It is basically the setting that is responsible for making this mountain look the way we want. This may not be the most precise answer, but simply if you drag this number to something like 2.4, it will just make all of these edges like more picky and more angular or let's say, which is if you think about it, that's a common look for all the different mountains are there. You will always find this really edgy peak on the top. Other than that for all the different settings like the offsetting gain, it will simply basically just control some different levels of black and white in the underlying texture. For example, if you drag this to southern like 0.7, what you will notice is that it will bring the whole thing down. All of these pores that we used to have some details on kind of Lad, my case, I will leave it at the default value, which is 0.88. And lastly, but not least, there is the gain which will basically control the scale factor of this noise texture, which the best way I actually can show you what exactly will do is by changing this number to something like two. And as you can see, it basically control the mid levels of this mountain. And as you can see, it became more flat. But in my case, I'm going to leave it at 4.2. Lastly, but not least, you will have here some different effect types. Let's say, for example, let's choose dots which will give you a result looking like this. But yeah, just play with them. In my case. Now I'm going to use any kind of effect, but feel free to play with them. And maybe you'll find something cool for the display settings, which are basically controlling the way of how this noise vector is displaying our plane. As I mentioned before, all of these settings are kind of self-explanatory. The height will control how high the noise Intensity Scale, which means that if we bring this number to something like one, the whole mountain will go up. And that's not actually the result we're looking for. So I'm going to leave it at 0.5, or actually let's choose 0.6. Offset is the same one as we explained before, maximum and minimum, which will control the maximum point this mountain and the minimum point of it, the falloff. And that's actually pretty useful setting. And simply, some people might ask, for example, this is just one mountain. What if I want this mountain to be really long? In that case, some people might suggest like hey, just bring the size, for example, on the y-axis or something like five. But this will give you this like kind of weird stretching effect, which is not exactly what we're looking for. In that case, you need to create some sort of a seamless texture along the y-axis. And that's why, if you chose in the fall, for example, x, you will notice that basically this edge, I will give you this kind of effect that looks like a formation. And by doing this, you will be able to scale this up in the y-axis and you will be able to create a very long formation. So in my case, I'm going to live it back and the default value, which is x and y. Lastly, but not least, you will have this thing called what replaying, which basically will create a just a simple plane that will be responsible to becoming a water plane, which actually we will dive a little bit deeper. Relate to Ron on what does this exactly do when we will create our lake? I'm going to disable it by clicking on water plane. And yeah, by doing this where basically prepare the main peak of the mountain for this shot. And all you have to do is basically to click out. Now some people might wonder, alrighty, seen, but what if I click out by mistake? Do I lose all these settings that I spent ages preparing? And the answer is now, as long as you didn't close Blender. So for example, if I delete this mountain that I just created, EX, Delete, and I go shift a mesh and landscape. The add-on will basically remember my latest settings by default, and it will give me the exact same mountain. So this setting is pretty useful if you asked me the other thing that you will notice, if I select this mountain and I hit N to open the side menu, you will have this Create tab, which is basically responsible on this ENT landscape. And it will allow you to change plenty of different settings right here. But just for you to know this work, as long as you didn't start changing the mesh, once you start changing it, it is over. But yeah, it is good to have all of these option right here in case you want to do anything related to changing the look of this mountain. But to be honest, what I would highly recommend is that you anneal the settings you want basically by experimenting in the operator panel, which will show up when you're changing the settings. Because till this point I find all of these settings right here a little bit confusing to work with, but yeah, just for you to know. Yes, you can change them even after we close, they entail landscape operator panel. If you close Blender and reopen it, everything will be back to default and all the settings we did will be gone. Another setting that you might want to play with is the landscape rotor, which I'm not going to dive in deep on it in this video because this video is already long. So we're going to discover a little bit more about how to create some erosions for this mountain. And the next video, See you in the next one. Everyone. 5. Creating Erosions: Hello and welcome. In this new video where we will basically create some erosions for our mountain. Alright, if you remember in the previous video, I basically mentioned that under the Create and in the landscape tools, you will find plenty of different kinds of useful options. One of them is actually the landscape or rotor. So basically, as the name states, it will basically create some erosions for us. So all you have to do is basically to select your mesh and go to landscape rotor. Wait for it for a second. And there isn't this menu that will pop up. Now, just to mention one thing, some people might stumble upon a problem where you will have some sort of a Python problem and basically red box that will appear right here. In that case, make sure to visit the last chapter of this course. What I will show you how you can fix that issue. So if you're stumbling upon that problem, just go fix it. It is pretty simple and easy. And if it is just working fine for you as it is working fine for me, then we can keep on going. Basically, erosions will add more details to our landscape. The only problem that I always stumble upon with this erosion tool using the ANT landscape is that it is actually pretty slow to compute. And when factoring the time that I spent waiting endlessly for the results to compute and the result that I was getting, it is not that good to be honest, because the more we crank this number up, the slower the whole process will be and the more time you will spend waiting ages for blender to compute the final result. So in our case, I will just stick to a low number, something like for which to a certain extent, we'll create a couple of erosions here and there. They're not looking that good. It is not that bad. But actually the main reason I'm using this erosion tool is for another thing, which is if you jump right here in the vertex groups, you will find that the erosion tool will create plenty of different maps or groups for us that we can use later for distributing elements, for creating textures and all of that. And to understand exactly what I mean, let me jump from the object mode to the weight paint mode. And as you can see, basically, each map will give you some details about different properties that you can use later. For example, if you select this flow rate, it will give you something looking like this. If you select water, for example, it will give you what are the areas where probably you will have some water If a trained or any of that. This is the rain map which can be useful for you when you want to put trees and all of that. So we can use all of these maps later on and they are pretty useful. And I think that the real value of this erosion tool is not actually in the erosions as much as it gives you all of these really, really handy vertex groups. Let me right now jump back to the object mode. The other thing that you will find that in one of these tools, which is called weight from slow. And if I click on it and just hit Okay, Basically it will generate this kind of map, which is called the slope map or a high slope map. And it is used in most of the terrain creation softwares. So what is pretty good to have this option in case you want to export this map to another software. Yes, it is such a cool thing basically to have all of these packaged in when add-on. But to be honest, I wouldn't rely, as I said, on the erosion tool to create a lot of erosions for my mountain. So yeah, this was a quick setup on how you can create some erosions using the ANT landscape. And I will see you in the next video. See you there. 6. Displacement Modifier: Hello and welcome. In this new video, where we will add an extra level of detail to our mountain. So this is our mountain and this is where we stopped last time. And basically we will use a technique that lies at the heart of every during creation process, which is using maps in combination with the displacement modifier, as you probably already guessed it. The first step will be to add a displacement modifier. So let's jump right here and let's look for displacement modifier. For whatever reason. I've never been able to find it at the first try. Yeah, there it is. Displays. Once you click on it, you will have this blob of mesh that will appear. But don't worry, we will fix that in a second. So basically the displacement modifier as the name state will displace our geometry using a texture. So the first thing we need to input some sort of a texture to it. And all you have to do is basically on New and let's maybe call this texture mountain displacement. And from here you will have this small button, just click on it and you will jump to the Texture tab from here we need to input some sort of a texture to displace this mountain. I will be using this rock 34 that you can download from NBN CG, and the two K version will be more than enough for us. Or you can just open it from the Resources tab that comes with this course. So here's what we will do. I will go to open in the Material tab, you will find this rock 34. The only map we need is the displacement. So double-click on the displacement and you will have it right here. Let's check couple of options right here. And the most important one, it is actually the color space. Make sure to change it from us RGB to linear. And maybe let's jump also to the mapping and make this map repeat something, let's say like eight times or let's say four times. Alright, don't worry about what's happening right here. We will fix it in a second. Let's jump back to the modifier. And from here, the main reason we're seeing our mountain like this is that our coordinates is set to local. And basically you need to change it from local to UV. But this mountain, We still didn't UV unwrap it. So that's what we should do right now. The process is pretty simple. All we have to do for now is to just disable this displays a modifier hit Tab to jump to the edit mode, hit a to select all of your mesh. And the first thing that you will notice is that basically our mesh is right now triangulated. It's not made of quads, but made of triangles. So basically you can hit Alt G and this will basically turn all of these triangles back to squares, which is a better topology for UV unwrapping. I will go you and you will have an option called unwrap. So just click on it. Wait for Blender for a second to compute the result. Yeah, Perfect. We UV unwrapped our model and let's jump back to the object mode. And if you just jumped to the object data properties you will find under UV that we created a new UV map. Let's jump to our modifier and let's enable it again. And it will still with this blob. And here's what we will do. It will change from local to UV. And for the UV map, Let's plug this one. And most importantly, let's change or less drag down the string to a pretty low number, something like 0.01. Of course, depending on the size of your mountain, you might have different values. And talking about the scale of our mountain, I'm going to go to item. And from here as you can see, the dimensions of my mountains pretty small. I really want to make it way, way bigger. So that's why I'm going to drag this scale suddenly like 300, which will give you the result like this. Right now, my mountain is 600 meter by 600 meters and the height of 172 meters. I might even also just scale it a little bit on the z-axis by hitting S, Z. And let's say it gets slightly up to something like 210 meters. And this is our mountain right now, what you gotta do is hit Control a and apply the scale. And by default, this will kind of change the power or the intensity of the display of that modifier. So you will have to drag this number a little bit up, Let's say something like five. And also you can change the mid-level somehow a high number, which will give you more edgy edges. Let's say basically the mid-level will control from which point the displacement is computed. If you put it at 0, it will be computed from the lowest point at 0.5 from the middle, from one is from the top. In my case, I'm going to choose something like 0.7. I think it is pretty suitable. And let's just play a little bit more with this displacement and let's put it at six. After doing this, you will end up with a result looking like you're seeing right now. The only thing is probably I need to add a little bit more details to it, which I will do basically by using or by adding a subdivision surface. So just click on subdivision surface. Bam, this is what you will get right now if you drag this number to something like two, notice that we're basically introducing a huge amount of detail. So our mountain right now, and that's exactly what we want. But let's just not do that and only leave the level viewport at one so that we save a little bit of memory and don't go crazy with it because we're adding a lot of geometry at this point. All right, the last thing I'm just going to fix is that if you notice, if I scroll a little bit down, my mountain will basically disappear. And this is an issue related to clipping, which is that if you jump to view, you will notice that there is this end clip, which is basically means that a blender will not be able to see anything that is basically further than 1 thousand meters. So let's turn this number to something like 100 thousand meters. And for the clip start, let's put it at 0.1 meter and you will be ready to go. And this is our mountain. I'm just going to put it to a new collection by hitting M New Collection and let's call it main mountain and hit Okay, so yeah, that's basically it for how you can add an extra level of details to your mountain. And in the next video, we will add our lake. See you there. 7. Creating The Lake: Hello and welcome. In this video, we will create our lake using the ANT landscape, alright, without going into details again about how to use the AND landscape led to this pretty fast. And one thing I'm going to do is basically to just disable my main mountain because by default my lake would be right here. So I'm going to zoom in a little bit and go Shift a and let's look for mesh landscape. The Operator Presets, if you remember, you will have this preset called Lakes one. So let's choose this one. And basically it will give you your late. And the nice thing is that it will also create a water plane for you. Let's just change the subdivisions from 128 to something like 256, so that we will basically have a more detailed mesh for the mesh size. I'm going to leave it the way it is and I'm not going to play a lot with all of these different settings. And if you want to change the look of this lake, you can play with the seed number, which will basically give you different variations that you can use. But for me, I'm actually going to stick with the default number, which is nine. I think that this will be suitable, especially that probably put our camera right here. So this will give us a huge lake in front of it and we can put some trees right here. So yeah, this is pretty suitable for what we're looking for. Other than that, all of these different settings, we already went over them in the mountain chapter when we were creating the mountain. One thing is that you will notice right now is that we are using actually the water plane, which says that basically the entire landscape would create landscape, which is the terrain of the lake or the ground part, and also will create a plane which will act like the water of this later and later on. We will texture each one of them on its own. Other than that, I'm going to leave all of these different settings the way they are and just click out. I'm going to put both of these in a new collection by hitting M and new Collection and let's call it Lake. Okay, and let's rename this to ground. And maybe let's rename this to water. I'm going to select both of them. Let's hit seven to jump to the top view, zoom out a little bit, and let's enable our main mountain, which by default it will be above the lake so we won't be able to see it. But don't worry, I'm going to select both of them, g, y, to move them right here. And let's basically scale them by a factor of, let's say something like 400, which will give you a result looking like this. It is clipping right now in the mountains, so J, y, and let's move it slightly right here until you get to a result looking like this. And what I'm going to do is basically to start framing my scene. To do this, it is pretty hard to basically stuck on this view and decide how everything will look like. So that's why I'm going to add another view. Hit N to hide the sidebar and hit D to hide this toolbar, hit one from the number pad to jump to the front view and hit Control Alt 0 from the number pad to move the camera up to the View we were seeing this 3D view port from. And after doing this, we need to position our camera, hit N and from view, make sure to check camera to view, which will basically log the camera to the viewport. So whenever you move your 3D view port, you will also basically be moving the camera. Let's just try to choose a nice framing for our shot, which I think will be something looking like this. Alright, perfect. So I think that this will be good for now. And just in case I'm going to disable this option so that I don't move my camera by mistake, uncheck it, and let's get back to where we used to work. Also, I'm going to hide the sidebar from here and just put a drop like this. And the first thing that I will notice is that my mountain is slightly smaller than the lake, and I need to make it a little bit bigger and maybe rotated slightly. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to move it on the y axis, j y. Let's put it somewhere right here. And I'm going to scale it a lot, like a lot until it fills this scene, something like this, maybe. Perfect. And I'm going to hit our z2 old rotated in the z-axis. And let's just rotate it slightly like this, which I think will be more suitable for the look we're looking for. And make sure to go Control a and apply the scale. Also maybe let's make the lake slightly bigger. Something just like this, I think would be good. Don't worry about this dead space right here because we will hide it later by the trees. This is basically our shot and our basic framing and how our chart will look like. And I will see you in the next video where we will start texturing the scene. So yeah, See you there. 8. Texturing the lake: Hello and welcome. In this new video where we will basically start texturing our lake. Alright, there are two different approaches when it comes to texturing. Some people might choose to basically just use some procedural workflow, which mean creating all the textures blender, but it is really time-consuming and it can get pretty complicated, pretty fast. Instead of that, we will be using what we call PBR textures, which mean they are textures that you can download from the Internet and use them in your project. In the resources folder of this course, you will find a folder called materials, and you will find a plenty of different stuff in it. And one of them is actually the ground 37 and the wet sand. If you open one of them, for example, let's open the color. You will notice that it is basically just a picture and it is basically seamless. So if we put this picture on the surface of the lake, will basically give the illusion like, Hey, this is how our life is looking like. And as you can see, there's a lot of dead leaves and grass and all of that right here. So it should look good. Not only that, but actually these kinds of maps, which we call PVR maps, comes with different maps like the roughness to plug into the roughness, the normal displacement and color. It is pretty easy to use and that is a quick way to achieve a really realistic result pretty fast. And that's exactly the workflow that we will be using in these videos. Alright, let's get back to Blender. And the first thing that we need to do is basically to just bring this a little bit up. Maybe zooming in here a little bit and maybe make it bigger. And one thing that I always do, which is basically to hide all of these overlays because they are kinda annoying basically by unchecking this and unchecking this and we need to see the final result. So let's click on the viewport shading to move to the rendered view. After doing this, I'm going to disable the collection of the mountain because I don't want to see it so that we can have faster previews and that's how we will be working. Let's get back to our ground. And from here, I'm going to create a new material. Let's call it, for example, a ground. Alright, so let's start texturing the easiest way to import all of these maps to Blender. It's basically by using a really, really useful shortcut that the Node Wrangler add-on will enable, which is Control Shift T. And here's how it works. First thing, make sure to select your principal P SDF by clicking on it, hit Control Shift D. And this will basically give you this menu where you need basically to move to where your materials are. And at first I'm going to start with the ground 37. Double-click on it. And right here, all you have to do is basically to select all of these different materials are actually images, are maps, and click on principle texture setup. And basically the Node Wrangler add-on will do its magic to connect them together. One problem that you will notice that why aren't we seeing texture the way we want? And the main reason is that if you remember the texture coordinates right here, we're using the UV data. And if I jump right here to see whether this object, the ground, does have actually a UV map or naught. If I jump right here, you will notice that I don't have actually any sort of UV map. So I need to unwrap my model and it is actually as easy as just hitting tab in this viewport and hit you and select and RAB. Wait for the results to compute for a second. And bam, right now we UV unwrapped our model and we do have right now a UV map. And as you can see also, we're starting to see our texture actually laid on the surface of the lake. I'm going to jump back right here to the object mode. The one thing that you will notice is that it looks pretty huge. And the main reason for that is that basically the terrain of this lake is so huge and we need basically to make this image smaller. So first things first, because we scaled our lake, we need to go Control a and apply the scale. And the other thing, let's jump right here and you will have an option for the scale if you select all of these and let's bring it to something like 20. Basically, we made that texture way, way smaller and this will basically give us a more realistic look like actually this texture is laid kinda perfectly on the surface of the ground. This method does have when major flaw, which is that if I jump to the top view by hitting the number of beds seven, you will notice that basically it is starting to give us this repeating pattern. If you focus, this texture is repeated many, many, many times because at the end of the day, it is is just small patch of grass. Yes. It is seamless that when you repeat it multiple times, it will start to see a repeating pattern. Now, an entire course can be made on how you can map your textures and avoid this problem. But in our case, if you hit 0 to jump back to the camera view, you will notice that there is no way or almost impossible to see this styling effect taking place. And that's why we don't need to worry about that in our case. Because we're pretty close to the ground and it is almost impossible to notice that. But if you were, for example, to create a drone shot or something, you need to address that issue because the tiling will be visible. Alright, let me get back to my camera view and get back control spacebar to minimize this editor. And the last thing I'm going to do is basically to just clean a little bit this semester happening right here. Now, by default, the Node Wrangler add-on when it imports all of these maps, it will connect them for you and do all the necessary work for you. The only thing that I don't like about this approach is that it creates this rerouting node, which I find it kind of annoying for me. I wouldn't like actually create a label for each group of nodes like this. So that's why I'm going to select this label, hit X, select this label hit x. And instead of using this rerouting note, I'm going to select it and just hit Control X. And this will basically just delete this routing node and everything will be connected directly to the mapping know, I feel like by doing this, it is easier to understand. So let's just put it right here. And the other thing I'm going to do is basically to select all of these nodes, hit Control G, hit F2 to rename the whole thing, all to rename the label. And let's call it, for example, ground. Now, here's the thing. If you focus in real life, it is almost impossible to basically make a texture or to have a texture or to have the graph's going like the way we're seeing right now. It doesn't look realistic because in normal world we will probably have some grass right here or this texture or this material. And right here we will have a different material, like some sort of a wet said if you want. So we need to mix this material with a wet sand material. And if you remember, we actually do have a wet sand material in the Materials folder that looks basically something like this. So we will mix this material, the ground material with that. And the easiest way to do this. First of all, let's select this principle be SDF Shift D to duplicate it. And let's put it right here. It will be inside this label, so hit Alt P to remove it from that label, make sure you're selecting your principle be SDF, control shift D will open this menu, and this time we're going to use the wet sand material, select all of the different maps and click on principle texture setup. And let's just move the whole thing a little bit down. I'm going to delete all of these labels. And let's select this rerouting node, this point and hit Control X. So everything will be cleaner and easier to understand. Now to see how this texture will look like, Control Shift and click on your principle be SDF. And it is looking like this. And as you can see, it is pretty huge and we need to make it smaller. Well, all you have to do is basically to just bring this scale to 20. And bam, you will have something looking just like this. So let's select this entire setup. Hit Control G, hit F2 to rename the whole thing, and let's call it wet sand. Alright, so right now we do have two different materials setup. One of them is for the ground and the other one is for the wet sand and we need to mix them. And because I use the word mix, that means that I need to mix this shader responsible for the ground with this shader responsible for the wet sand. So let me look to shift a and let's look for mix shader. I'm going to put it right here. And basically all you have to do is to take the first ground material and plug it to the first socket. And let's take this one and put it into the second socket and take this and plug it to the surface. So what's happening right now is that a blender is using 50 per cent of the ground and 50 per cent of the wet sand. But that's not exactly what we want because we want the final result to be like following. We want the upper parts to use the ground texture and these kind of perpendicular or these sort of formation looks like a cliff, will have the wet sand material. So we need to create a mask that will tell blender that, hey, use ground here and use wet sand here, which we can do by inputting some sort of a map to the factor socket of this mix shader. So that basically we will have some sort of a gradient that will go from here to here, where we will have the wet sand on the bottom parts right here. And the gross material basically will go right here. And that's exactly what we will be doing. So we need some sort of a gradient that will take place right here that will tell blender to transition at this points from the wet sand ground material, we need the gradient, which means that we will add a gradient map or a gradient texture. So go Shift a and let's look for gradient texture. Let's just put it right here. We need to add the mapping setup to it. So just hit Control T and make sure to choose UV. And from here I'm just going to bring this a little bit up and Control Shift and click on this gradient texture to see how it will look like. And our gradient right now is going from the left to the right. We need to make it go from the bottom up. So all you have to do is to just rotate it on the y-axis, 90 degrees. So if I go like this and type 90, basically the gradient is going from the bottom up. Just to make the whole thing easier, I'm just going to hide this water plane and we need to basically move this gradient transition somewhere right here. So where does the node that will allow us to control the contrast of this gradient texture? Well, it is the color ramp node. So let's go Shift a and let's look for color ramp. And let's just put it right here. And now, all you have to do basically is to just make it way, way more contrasty until it starts to look like the result we want. One thing I'm going to do right now is to just enable this water plane so that I know exactly what I want my gradient to be. Let's zoom in slightly and let's just keep on dragging this bad boy a little bit up until we get to resolve looking like this. And maybe if you want to make the whole thing even looks smoother in terms of this transition, you can change it from linear to ease, which will make the whole transition way, way smoother. And maybe also you can take this a little bit like this and maybe bring this a little bit down, just like you're seeing right now. So basically right now with a black areas will have the wet sand material and the white areas will have the ground material. So let's plug all of this data to the mix shader, the factor socket. And if you control shift and click on this shader, you will have something looking like this. And what you will notice is that it is not working the way you're expecting it to work. And the main problem happening right now is that we need to flip both of these because it is kinda flipped. So if I go like this, notice that basically the wet sand right now is right here and the grass is taking place right here. And that's exactly the result we want. So it is just a matter of flipping both of these. And as you can see right now, we added more variation, especially to the way of how this grass, or the way of how this land will look like. And that's exactly the result we want. And it will just make the whole thing looks slightly better and more realistic. And right now the final thing that we need to address is the displacement. Because if you notice basically right now we're only using the displacement out of the ground texture, this one, even though our wet sand also come with a displacement map. And the easiest way to do this is like following. I'm just going to hit Control Space bar to maximize my shader editor. And from here, I need to mix it, this displacement, this displacement. And that's why I'm going to just delete this one and X delete this one. And let's mix this and this. So let's go Shift a and let's look for a mix RGB. Let's take the color of the first one to the first socket and the color of the second one, the second socket. And also we need to tell blender where to use each displacement. So also we need to take the scholar that is coming out of this and let's plug it to the factor and you will have something looking like this. But if you remember, we flip it both of these right here. So probably I will also have to flip them right here so that my displacement work the right way. And after doing this, I'm going to plug this to a displacement node by going shift a. And let's look for displacement. Let's put it right here. And I'm going to take the color and plug it to the height and take the displacement and plug it to displacement control spacebar to minimize this editor and probably will say, Hey, you're seeing nothing is happening, what's going on? And the main reason nothing is happening because as you probably remember, when it comes to using real displacement, you need to activate their option because it is not activated by default. So all you have to do is to jump to the material tab. And from here you will find an option called settings. And under settings you will have displacement. Make sure to change it from bump only to displacement and bump, you might notice that nothing much is happening. And the main reason because you will have this number called scale. And right now it is one, that one is not enough because of the size of our lake is so huge. So you might need to bring this number slightly, something like five. And as you can see, we introduce some small bumps right here on the grass. And it might not be that visible yet, but let's try for example ten. And as you can see, we're adding small bumps here and there. But one of the things that you probably should be familiar with from previous chapters is that whenever you are using micro displacement, you should also add with it a subdivision surface. So let's go add modifier and let's add a subdivision surface. And from here, make sure to check adaptive subdivision. And as you can see right now, we're adding a lot of details and small bumps and I think it is really, really strong. So let's drag this number to something like two. And yeah, I think that this is looking way, way better. And if I click on 0, this is the result we're having right now where we made this ground really, really rich in terms of details and this will be our ground for the lake. And the last thing I'm going to do is basically to also create a label for this by selecting all of this. And let's hit Control G, hit F2 to rename it. And let's call it, for example, the mask. Let's put it right here. And this will basically be our basic material for the ground of this lake. Alright, that was how you can texture your lake. And in the next video, I will show you how to create a really simple water material. So yeah, See you there. 9. Texturing The Water: Hello and welcome. In this video, we will add the material for our water. Alright, so this is where we stopped last time basically by creating the material of the ground of our light. And right now we will move on to texturing this water. Now of course, there are multiple approaches are doing this. You can go fancy and use some complicated procedural workflow. But in our case, the water is not the main elements of the shot. So that's why I want to show you a really quick way of how you can basically create really realistic and nice-looking water without spending ages basically just fiddling with notes. Yeah, Let's just do that. So first things first I'm going to select my water. And the first thing I'm going to do is to go to the object properties. And you will notice that basically there is no UV map, so I need to UV unwrap my model, which is pretty simple. Hit tab and hit you, hit unwrap and hit Tab again. That's all right. Now we do have our UV map. After doing this, we need to create a new material for the water. So just click on New and let's call it, for example, water. After doing this, basically we will not use the principle, the SDF. So I'm going to delete it by clicking on it x. And from here, I'm actually going to use a different shader, which is called the glossy shader. So go a and let's look for glossy, be SDF. Let's connect it to the surface and right away you will not notice anything happening. But if you start dragging this roughness a little bit down, notice that basically it's starting to look like it is basically water. Let's say something like 0.15. And yeah, this is definitely looks like it is surface of the water. The only downside for this is that basically when we think of water, there are small ripples or waves on top of it. So that's why we need to add an extra level of detail to sell that illusion. And the nice thing if you notice, is that the glossy be SDF actually does have a normal socket, which as you probably already know, it is basically meant for you to fake the illusion of bumps and small details on your geometry. So it is like a quick way to achieve such look. And that's exactly the technique that we will be doing. We need to add some sort of data for this. And we need to think where is the texture might look actually like the way the water or the ripples of the water look like some people might go with the noise texture. But actually in my case, I'm not going to use it and I'm going to use the mass grief texture. So go Shift a and let's look for Musgrave texture. Let's put it right here and I need to plug the height to the normal. But as you probably know, this is a gray socket and this is a purple socket. So I need to turn this data to a vector data from here. And the easiest way to do this, what is the node that converted the black and white a vector? Well, it is the bump node. So go Shift a and let's look for Bump. Let's put it right here. And all you have to do basically right now is to take the height and plug it to the height and take the normal and plug it to the normal. Nothing much is happening. But don't worry because we need to play a little bit with all of the different settings. So let's start bringing the scale a little bit up to something like 40. And bear, as you can see, basically, we're now creating the effect of like ripples of water everywhere. Maybe also we can bring the details to something like five. And they think that this is looking better. Let's try lowering the dimension to something like 1.5. And let's just keep the leg inherited the way it is. And if I hit 0, this is the result that you will get. I'm going to hit Control Space bar to maximize my editor. And yeah, I think that actually look like it is basically a surface of water with some couples imperfections and small waves here and there. The only thing that I suggest you to do is basically maybe to bring this scale a little bit up to something like 50. Just basically to make these waves a little bit more dense. But again, it is just a matter of self preference. Just make the result that you are satisfied with. And yeah, this is basically a quick way on how you can create a really nice looking water material without bothering playing with a lot of nodes and all of that. And right now, I'm just going to enable my main Mountain Dew see how the whole thing is looking. And yeah, we're starting to get there slowly. And in the next video, I will show you how to texture this mountain. So yeah, See you there. 10. Texturing The Mountain (Adding Rocks): Hello and welcome. In this video where we will basically texture our MT or actually start texturing our mountain. So the first thing I'm going to do is basically to just disable this lake collection to save a little bit of memory and make my preview faster. And let's focus on our mountain. And also, I noticed that my drawings are still visible right here, so I need to remove them. Perfect, This is way better. Alright, here's how we will texture our mountain. First of all, the mountain is made of rocks or right? So we need to add rock material to our mountain and then we will add on top of that some snow. So basically, this setup meant for the mountain is composed of two different materials, the rock and some snow above it. So let's start with the base layer, which is basically the rocks. I'm going to select my mountain and let's create a new material and let's call it mountain. And just for the sake of making everything slightly faster, I'm going to disable the subdivision surface modifier, so I have faster previews. Now for this mountain, we need to add a rock material. We already did a lot of that in the texturing the lake chapter. So basically I'm not going in details about how to do this because we already did this multiple times. So here's what we will be doing. First of all, let's select this principle be SDF, hit Control Shift D. And in the Materials folder, you will find this rock 28, this one Iraq 28. Double-click on the folder to enter inside it and you will find four different maps. And all you have to do is basically to just select them and click on principle texture setup. And right away you will see the following result. Basically our mountain to a certain extent right now textured. The only downside of this is that basically the texture is so huge as you probably already remember, and I said that 1 million times. So we need to bring the scale from here, slightly up, let's say, to something like ten. And this will give you the following result. The only problem with this, as you probably can remember it, that it will give you the styling effect. And you can see there is a repeating pattern happening, so we need to address that issue. One of the most famous methods to fix this problem is basically by combining different textures. And in our case, we will mix these rocks with another rock texture. After that, we will cover it in snow. So in a way, it will be kinda impossible for you to see the tiling because we will break it using different materials, like the second rock and the snow that will cover the whole thing. So don't worry about that. We're good to go. The only problem that I'm seeing with this texture is that basically it does have actually some green in it, which is, may not be exactly the look I'm looking for. So that's why I'm going to desaturate this map slightly, which is actually pretty simple. It is basically by going to the color, that base color. And after it, we will go Shift a. And let's look for hue and saturation. Let's put it right here. And all you have to do is basically to drag the saturation a little bit down. That said something like 0.5. And I think that this will look better if I click on the hue and saturation and hit m2 mu the node, this is the before and this is the after, this is before, and this is the after. And I think that this is actually more realistic because we're not expecting to have a lot of greenery in our mountain. The last thing I'm going to do is basically to just scroll down a little bit and I'm going to delete this label as usual. Also delete this one. I'm going to select this rerouting node and hit Control X to delete it. And by doing this, I will have a cleaner view and I'm going to go above all of these. I'm going to hit Control G, hit F2 to rename the whole thing. And let's call it, for example, rock 01. So this is our first row Material. Right now we're going to combine this rock material with another one that we will be able to break somehow the styling effect. So first things first, let's just select this principle be SDF, hit Shift D to duplicate it, hit Alt B to remove it from this label of the rock one control shift D. And let's write now move Devi Iraq 11 and select all of the different maps and click on principle texture setup. And you will have something looking like this to see how this whole thing will look alike. Let's zoom in on the principle be SDF Control, Shift and click on it. And this is how our second material is looking like. And as usual, we need to bring the scale a little bit down basically by changing this, Let's say this time to a number like five, which I think will be more suitable for the look we're looking for. And right now, I'm just going to clean the whole thing by removing all of these unnecessary labels for now, this select this rerouting node Control X, and let's create a label for this whole nodes, for all of these nodes control G, F2, let's call it rock 02 and hit Enter. And also, I think I'm going to desaturate this one a little bit. So go shift. Let's look for a hue and saturation. Let's put it right here and drag the saturation down to something like 0.7. And this is looking way better. So right now we do have two different textures. One of them is the first rock and the other one at the second rock, and we need to mix them together. How can we do this by using the node mix shader, go Shift a, and let's look for a mix shader. I'm going to put it directly on this link, so it will be automatically connected. And I'm going to take the first-principle be SDF and plug it to the first socket, which will move this first socket to the second socket. So right now we're using 50 per cent of the first rock and 50 per cent of the second rock. But do we need to tell blender where to use each texture, which we can basically do by plugging some sort of a map into the factor socket. But what is actually the best way to combine them? Surprisingly, I want to show you another method, which is that if you remember in the early days of this chapter of the mountain, when we use the erosion tool it created for us all of these different vertex groups or weight maps. And just to preview them again, I'm going to select one of them and jump to the weight paint. And basically maybe we somehow can use one of these to mix our different textures. For example, if I select this water, if there was a way of how I can turn these data to a black and white data and plug it right here. I will basically tell blender to, in this case, the blue areas will have the rocks and the green areas will have the second rock. But is there a way to turn this weight map to a black and white map? Well, actually there is, and it is actually pretty simple. All you have to do is that makes sure you're selecting the group you want. And in my case, I'm going to choose water and change from white paint to vertex paint. Nothing much will happen and probably will have the same view. And all we have to do is basically to go to paint. And from here you will find vertex color from white, click on it and bam, it will turn the weight map that we use to see to a black and white map. And that's exactly what the result we want. And if you scroll down a little bit under vertex color, this is our data. This is the black and white data that is visible right now, right here, which is called in this case Cole, I'm not going to change it, but you can rename it. And right here in the shader editor, if you go to add input vertex color, you will find actually call which is the exact same group right here. So go add input vertex color coal, and let's put it right here. And if you control shift and click on it, this is basically our map. And just to not do any mistake, I'm going to jump back to the object mode. So we can use this to control or to drive our factors socket. The only problem with this texture is that I will probably need to make it a little bit more contrasty, which basically begs to use the color ramp node. So I'm just going to take it right here and let's add a color ramp, color ramp. Let's put it right here, and let's just start basically making the whole thing way, way more contrasty, just like so something like this will be good. And let's take the color and plug it to the factors socket. Right now, if you preview your mix shader Control Shift and click on it, you will get something looking like this. And as you can see, more or less with starting to break, especially in these areas, the pattern of the rocks that we use to see. And that's exactly what we want. If I get back to 0, yes, they're stole some tiling effect visible right here, but we're going to address that in the next video. And also the other thing I'm thinking of doing is basically for the first rock, if you remember, we plugged right here in the scale ten, I'm thinking of dropping it down to something like seven because I feel it is like more suitable like this. But last thing right now that we need to address is basically the displacement maps that we're using. If you focus closer, basically right now we're only using the displacement of the first rock texture, even though we need to tell blender to use Bot, the displacement of the first rock and the second rock. So just like we did before when we were trying to combine the displacement of two different texture in the lake chapter right here, we need to combine this displacement map with this one. So let's just do that pretty quick. I'm going to delete both of these placement nodes, and I'm going to look for mixed RGB, makes RGB. I'm going to take the first displacement texture from the first rock and plug it to color one. And also take the displacement of the second rock texture and plug it to color too. So right now we're mixing them. And also we need to plug the mask that we created also to this mix because we need to tell blender where to use each displacement map. So let's take the scholar and here's a really handy shortcut. Shift click on the first socket and let's move on to the node, which is this mixed node shift and neglect on where you want to connect it. So basically right now, both of these are selected and just hit F and they will basically get connected. This a really, really handy shortcut, especially when you want to connect to very distant nodes. Nice. So all you have to do right now is basically to just drive this data coming out of this mixed node through a displacement. So go Shift a and let's look for displacement. Let's put it right here, take the color and plug it to the high end. And we need to plug this whole thing to the displacement socket of our material output. Nothing much is happening because by default, displacement will not be visible. So we need to activate it, which means that we need to go to the materials properties and change the displacement from bump only the displacement and bump. You can of course play with the scale a little bit. For example, let's just try five. Alright, this is, I think is better looking, let's say, and let's just get back to our subdivision surface. It just enable it for a second and let's see how the whole thing would look like. And yeah, I think that this is actually looking pretty good. And this is basically how you can create your rock material for our mountain. And in the next video, I will show you how to cover this whole thing with some snow here and there. Yeah. See you there. 11. Texturing The Mountain (Adding Snow): Hello and welcome. In this video, as I mentioned before, we will add some snow to our mountain. The first thing to add this now is basically to import the maps responsible for the snow material. So to do this, I'm going to select this principle be SDF Shift D to duplicate it. Let's put it right here and make sure to hit Alt B to remove it from that label, then hit Control Shift D. And in the Materials folder you all find this snow 00 sex. So double-click on it. And for this material, I'm actually going to only import the color and the normal and the roughness. I'm not going to use the displacement. Then click on principle texture setup and bam Blender will do its magic to connect them. And let's just delete this label x, this label X, select this rerouting node Control X. This is more readable. I'm going to select this whole thing, it Control G to put it inside a label, it F2, and let's rename it to snow to see the whole thing, how it will look like Control Shift and click on this principle be SDF. This is our snow material. It is somehow pretty huge. So let's bring this scale to something like seven. And this is, I think, more suitable for the look we're looking for. And the other thing I'm going to do in the principle be SDF, is basically to bring this subsurface number to somehow low number, something like 0.001. And also, I'm going to change the type from random walk to Christmas in burly or I don't know how it is supposed to be pronounced. And let's just make sure that this color is actually white. And yet this will just basically make some light go through the surface of this snow, which will just somehow make the whole thing look better, Nice. So all we have to do right now is basically to combine this nanomaterial with the rock material. If we focus slightly, this mix shader node is basically the node responsible for combining the result of the two different tracks. So the result that it will give us such as going through here, it is basically the rocks. So we need to mix it, this whole thing with the snow. So let's add another mix shader and let's put it right here. And then we'll take the snow and plug it to the first socket, which is right here. And here's another handy shortcut. Click on Alt with the right mouse button. Drag over the nodes that you want to connect. You will have this red line and when you release it, it will basically connect them automatically. So this is also a really handy shortcut when you want to connect two very distinct nodes. And right now we need to plug some sort of a data to the factor socket to tell blender where to use the rocks material and where to use the snow material. In our case, we will not be using actually, this is vertex groups that we will use a different technique, basically just by using the normals of this geometry. Here's what we will be doing to just explain the whole thing. So in a logical way, basically the snow should somehow be these areas right here, right here, and right here, basically on the flat areas, if there is a way to extract all of these data, which means they're flat areas of our mesh and we tell blender to put the snow on them. So the first step that we need to do is to extract a map of the flat areas of our mountain. For example, these areas right here are basically flat, so the snow should be right here. And these areas are not flat. They are perpendicular and going straight upward. So it is pretty hard for the snow to basically be there. The really nice thing there is something called the normal. The normal is basically in mathematics, here is the vector that is perpendicular to a certain plane. For example, I'm just going to hit three to jump to the side view. And as you probably remember, these parts of the mountain or flat, That's why the normal vector of them is actually pointing like this. It is perpendicular on the plane. Meanwhile, these bars right here, the normal vector will be pointing like this. So we need to tell blender that, hey, the areas that does have a normal vector pointing up are the areas where you should put the snow. And the nice thing is that it is actually pretty simple to do this. We need normal. So let's just go Shift a and look for normal and make sure to select normal map. And if you control shift and click on it, basically this map right now contains our normal data that it is showing us the x data and the y data and the z data. We only need the z data because it is the vector that we needed. The stuff that are pointing up, up means the z-axis. So we need to separate these by going shift a, and let's look for separate x, y, and z. By default, it will be on the X, but just Control Shift, click another time to move to the Y Control Shift and click again to move to the Z. And it will give you something looking like this. The real magic will be when we add actually a color ramp after this whole thing. So I'm just going to take it slightly right here and let's add a color ramp. Let's put it right here. And if I start dragging this slider like this, notice that basically the areas that are perpendicular will turn to black, which means that these areas shouldn't have snow. So that's why there are black and just keep on dragging the slider until you start getting a result that you're satisfied with. What you will look something just like this. The only thing I might want to do is basically also to drag the white flag. So the whole thing will be slightly more contrasty. Something just like this, I think will be good. And as you probably already guessed it, I need to plug the scholar to the factor of this mix shader. So let's just do that. Take the color and plug it to the factor Control Shift and click on the second mix shader. And yeah, as you can see, the snow is right now on all of these areas. If you hit 0 to see the final result, this is our mountain with the snow. And of course, you can play as much as you want with all of these sliders until you start getting the result, you won't. So yeah, I think that this is looking pretty good. And the last thing I'm going to do is basically to select these nodes, control G to group them. And let's rename this whole thing by hitting F2. Let's call this labor, for example, snow mask. Nice. So this is basically our entire node tree responsible for texturing this mountain. And as you can see, it is actually not that complicated once you understand the concept of mixing different maps and all of that. And if I enable my lake right now, this is the result we're getting, which I think it is looking pretty good, especially after we start adding more and more details like the grass, the trees, the flowers and the rocks. And that's exactly what we will be doing in the next couple of videos, where I will show you how you can use some geometry knows to basically distribute some grass and different stuff on this lake. So yeah, See you there. 12. Adding Grass: One of the many things that can actually, with these scores is actually this forest assets, which basically contain trees with some grass, flowers, and some rocks, which we will basically use to fill out our scene and all of these different assets. I will show you how to create them in a future chapter dedicated on how you can create your own nature assets. But for the sake of this chapter, we will use all of these assets and we will start by adding some grass to our scene. So yeah, let's just do that. Alright, so when it comes to adding grass, there are multiple approaches on how you can do this. Some of you actually my suggested just use Blender built-in particle system. But instead of that, I will show you an easier method in my opinion and throw it actually will learn something new and you will start basically using geometry nodes. So instead of using the particle system to distribute our grass, actually we will use the geometric nodes. Don't worry, it's gonna be pretty simple. Alright, so first things first, I'm just going to disable my main mountain so that I keep everything clean and I'm going to select my lake and I'm going to hit the dart from the number pad to basically zoom in on this object, which is the ground where I basically want the grass to be distributed. And after doing this, I'm just going to drag this slightly and dynein to add a geometry node modifier to this as a starting point, let's just jump from the shader editor to the geometry node editor. And also I'm going right here to the Modifiers tab, and I'm going to click on New and make sure you're selecting your ground. Click on New, and let's call it, for example, vegetation. And the first thing that you will notice is that basically blender added the geometry node modifier. So at the end of the day, geometric nodes, it is just another form of modifiers that you can add to a certain scene or to a certain object. And basically geometry nodes are just a sequence of operation in form of nodes. If I just zoom in slightly right here, you will notice that you will have your usual group input and your usual group output. And you can do a bunch of operations right here. Just as an example, if I go Shift a and look for set position, you will notice that I'm basically able to move this landscape or this lake element the way we want in every different axes, which is exactly like changing the location of this object from here. So that's why, as I mentioned, basically the geometry nodes. It is just another way to do different operations on a certain object. Alright, so I'm going to delete this set object Control X, and we need to distribute our grass on our geometry. So here's how we will do this. First of all, we will use a node that is called Distribute points on faces. So go a and let's look for distribute points on faces. And if I put it between these two links, two will get connected. And as you can see, it actually turned our mesh into points just for the sake of making everything more clear, I'm going to hide my water plane. It turned our mesh into these really, really, really small dots or points, which as the name state, it will distribute some points on the faces of our mesh and you can change the density and all of that. And basically all what we will do is basically to tell blender, put the grass in the places of these dots. But before we do this, I'm actually going to change a couple of settings because this is where you way too dense. And if I input any sort of geometry that contains dozens of faces, it will basically just crashed the software. So that's why we need to reduce at least the density of all of these points first, which luckily we do have actually a slide are called density, which is used to control the density of all of these points. The only thing I'm gonna do is basically to change the distribution method from random to Poisson disk, which is more accurate distribution when it comes to nature. And all you have to do is basically to drag this density maximum to a lower number. So for example, let's try one. And yeah, you will basically have fewer points right now. They may not be that visible yet because they are really, really small. But I think a density maximum of one will be good for now. We might change it later, especially after we add our grass. So how can we tell blender to replace all of these points with grass? Well, there is actually another node called instances on points, not two points, instances on-point. So just click on it and let's put it right here. Nothing will happen and even your points will disappear. Because we will need to input some sort of geometry to tell blender what to put on the points. So right now we need to import our grass element. It is as easy as go to File append, and from here jumped your materials folder and you will find this forest assets, double-click on it and move to collection. And right here you will find the different assets that comes with this blend file. And for the sake of making everything easier, I'm going to select all of them, click Append. They will basically be right here. And I'm going to disable all of them for now. So I save a little bit of memory and whenever I need one of them, I will basically just use them. So right now we need to distribute the grass on our mesh. So let's just take the grass and drag it right over right here to the geometry node. And you will have this new node called collection info, which does contain the grass elements. And all you have to do is basically to hook the geometry to the instance. But before doing this and this is a general advice. I will highly recommend that before you connect any operations in the geometric node, that will introduce a lot of computing to the computer, makes sure to at least do that gradually. Which means, for example, if I hook this geometry right now two instances, I will introduce a lot of computation to Blender because he will need to calculate everywhere where the grass should be, which does have the potential to crush the software if you don't have a really high-end gear on your computer. So that's why what I would recommend, for example, is to drop this density maximum to something like 0. Even when I will connect this geometry right here, it will not do anything and I will start increasing this density maximum gradually. So let's just connect geometry and plug it to instances. As I mentioned, nothing will happen. And after doing this, Let's start dragging this density maximum slightly up. So let's try 0.1. And just by doing this, basically we introduce a huge amount of grass. So basically, if we left it actually at one, we might even crashed the software. You will have something looking just like this in my viewport is actually really, really slow and we will deal with that. The first thing I'm going to do is basically to check separate children and also check reset children and also make sure to check instance. And right now as you can probably see, we cannot see the actual mesh. And the main reason for that is that we need to tell blender also to use it, which we can do actually by adding a joint geometry notes. So go Shift a and let's look for a joint geometry. Let's put it right here. And I will take my original geometry, which is the ground of the lake and just plug it to the geometry. And as you can see right now, you will have something looking just like this. And one thing I need to address right now is actually the scale of my grass because it is way, way small to bring the scale. Some of you actually might just suggest to change the scale from here, which actually will do the same thing. If I bring the scale, for example, to something like five, it will just make all the grass way, way bigger. And that's of course definitely an approach that you can take. But instead of that, I want to be able to control the scale and at the same time, I want to add some scale variations, so some graphs will be bigger than others. So to do this, we need to plug another node called random value. If I go Shift a and let's look for random value, you will have this node and I will plug it from value to scale. And right now you will have to actually two different sliders. One of them is 0 and the other one is one. This is our minimum, and this is our maximum. So let's, for example, change our minimum to something like seven and our maximum does something like ten. And this will give you a result looking like this. And the first thing I noticed is that basically I think I will probably also need to bring the scale of slightly more. So let's try ten to 15. I think that this will actually be more suitable for the locker trying to get. And I'm going actually to just lower down this density factor so that basically I will be able to move easier and my 3D view port and later on I will and get it back to one. So let's just take this density factor and plug-in low number, something like 0.1. And by doing this, I will be able to move easier in my 3D view port. Alright, so let's just make this whole thing bigger and let's just jump to the rendered view. You will have something looking like this, which I think it is looking pretty good. And especially if I activate my water plane right now, this is the result we're getting, but it is actually still really far from perfect. And here's what I exactly mean. First of all, let me hide again my water plane. And as you can see actually that the grass is also distributed under the surface of the water, which is not ideal. It is not a big deal because it will not be visible. Anyway. This actually does have the potential to slow down our computer drastically because blender is still computing all over this graph right here. So we need to figure out a way of how to tell blender that hey, only distribute the grass on the top areas and not these parts that will be covered with the water. That's number one. And the other thing, yes, we introduce the random value to the scale. But what about also we introduce a random value also do the rotation, which will also make this whole grass looks slightly better and not basically all of it will just look uniform in terms of rotation. And that's exactly what we will be doing in the next video. See you there. 13. Finalizing The Look of The Grass: Alright, in this video we'll finalize the look of our grass. So let's just do that first things first to make everything more readable and easier to understand, I'm going to organize my notes too, just something like this. And right now we need to introduce some random rotation. So I said random, which means I will use definitely the random value. So let's just hit Shift D to duplicate it, and let's take the value and plug it to the rotation. The only problem that you will notice is that basically they are rotated weirdly. And here's why. Basically when we plug the random value, as you can see to the rotation, blender will apply this operation to all the different axes. For example, let's say this time blender is picking the number ten as a random rotation angle. Basically Blender will rotate this ten degrees on the x and the y and the z, even though we only want blender to rotate the grass on the z-axis. So we need to tell blender that hey, only rotate the grass on the z-axis. Where does the node that will allow us to do such thing? It is a node called the Rotate older. So if you go Shift a and let's look for rotate ruler, this node. So just click on it and let's put it right here. And basically the Rotate older will work like following. You need to pick the axis angle and we need to cut this link by hitting Control right mouse button and dragging over the link. And right here you need to choose which axis you want. In our case, x is 0. We don t want to rotate on the x. Y is 0, we don t want to rotate on the Y, but the Z number is one. So that basically when we will multiply this value by all of this will be 0 on the x, 0 on the y. And Blender will pick the random value that we choose only for the z because z does have actually the number one. So all you have to do is basically to just take the value and plug it to the angle. And right now blender is choosing a random value from ten to 15. And I'm going to change it to something like from 0 to ten or let's say 50. So basically right now blender is rotating the grass on the z-axis, a random value from 0 to 50. And this group right now is actually my grass. So I'm going to select all of the nodes, hit Control G, it F2 to rename the whole label, and let's call it grass. And the last thing that we need to address is basically how can we tell blender to only distribute the grass on top of the surface? And that's actually also pretty simple because if you noticed on the distribute points on faces, we do actually have a density factor. And what you need to do is basically to input some sort of a map right here that will tell blender that hey, distribute the grass only on the top areas. To do this, we need to get a little bit smart. And here's what I mean. Let's suppose that the height of our lake, let's say it will be, for example, ten meter. This is just hypothetical. So probably it's not the right height, but it's not a big deal just for the sake of explanation. And let's suppose that the threshold where basically the water will be visible, let's say it is on the point of two meters. So what we need to tell blender in the geometry know that Hey, everything that is higher than two meter will have grass and everything that is below it will not have any sort of grass. So we need to tell that to Blender using geometric nodes. And it is not actually that complicated. Alright, here's what we will do. We need to plug a map, as I mentioned, to this density factor because we need to control the position of where Blender will basically add the grass, we need to position nodes. So that's why I'm going to add a position node. And let's put it right here. But we only need the z data because the z is what control what is up and down. So let's separate this two x, y and z by going shift a. And let's look for separate x, y, and z. And let's take the position and plug it to the vector. And right now we only need the z data. But how can we tell blender What is the point of where to start computing the result? For this, you will need a subtract node. So let's look for math. Let's put it right here, and let's change this operation to subtract. Let's take the z and plug it to the first value. And right now, if you take this value and plug it to the density factor, you will see that the grass is actually right now visible on the top areas. And the main reason for this is that we will probably need to change this value slightly to change the threshold of where Blender will basically start putting the grass bed. Before I do this, I'm going to address a slight issue, which is if you notice, my grass is so, so dense right now. And probably if we crank this number to a high value, it might crash the software. So we need another note to control the density of this grass. Of course, you can change it from this density maximum, but I wouldn't play a lot with this, and I would rather basically just changed the factor from here. So that's why I'm going to add another math node. And before I connect it, I'm going to change the operation to multiply and plug it right now. And let's drag this number to something like 0.1. I noticed that basically by lowering this number, we will change the density of the grass. Let's try 0.001 and you will have less grass right now. That's Troy zero-point. One, this is more 0.1. You will have something just looking like this. And right now, if we start playing with the subtract value, basically you will be able to add more and more grass and just lower it until you start getting the results we want until it looks something like this. Maybe even lower it down to something like minus three. And because right now we are on the spectrum actually we can change it to add and track list of three. So it will make more sense. 3.1 basically just start making this number bigger until you have a decent density. The grass, let's say something like five. And maybe also I'm going to lower this number to something like 0.05, which I think will be good. And if I jump right now to the rendered view and hit Control Space bar to maximize the whole thing. This is what we're getting and I kinda like it. I think it is looking pretty good. And let's adjust enable my water plane so I can be able to see everything better. This is our scene right now and I think it is looking pretty good. The only thing I might do actually is basically to bring the scale of this grass even up, let's say something like 20 to 25. And also maybe changed right now the density maximum to something like 0.01. This is not so much, so maybe let's drag this to 0.2. Yeah, I think that this is looking good and maybe bring this slightly app or something like zero-zero point fifteen. Basically, I always try to play with the density maximum and this multiply node because both of them can have a different effect when it comes to change the density of the grass. So let's maybe even drag this number slightly up. And let's try 0.02. And this is looking right now pretty good. The only thing I'm going to do is basically to just select all of these nodes. It Control G to put them inside the label, it F2 to rename the label. And let's call it, for example, height mask. And basically this group of nodes will always be responsible and telling them blender to only put the grams on the top areas and maybe to make your life easier in case in the future you want to get back to this and understand it better. Make sure to select this Add Node and open the sidebar by hitting N. And all you have to do, for example, is to change the label, for example, to something like height threshold. So in the future it will be called high threshold, which will give you a better understanding of what does this exact note do. And maybe also can change the color. Maybe let's change it to some sort of a shade of the same color, maybe something like this. So it will be easier to know what does this exact node do in this node is actually controlling the density. So let's call it density factor, and let's also change its color to maybe the same exact color. Alright, so basically in the future, you will know that both of these two nodes, you can play with the values of them until you get the result you want. And this is basically our final setup. It is responsible and distributing the grass, first of all, on the surface of our lake. And this group right here, it is responsible for limiting that distribution only on the top. Areas are only on the top faces. That's basically how you can distribute different assets. And in the next video, I will show you how you can distribute some other elements like the flowers and the trees and all of that just by using the geometry nodes, which actually will be super simple just by duplicating this group of bunch and changing couple of different setting here and there. Yeah, See you there. 14. Adding Flowers and Rocks: Hello and welcome. In this new video where I will show you how to distribute the flowers and the rocks on the lake or actually underground part of our lake. With that basically doing, again the whole setup, it is actually right now pretty simple to also distribute any element we want, only have to do is basically to select all of these nodes, hit Control Shift D to duplicate them and keep the links. So it will basically the links from the group input that is going to distribute points on faces and also our height mask so that everything that will distribute it will always only be visible on the top areas. And after doing this, all you have to do, for example, let's suppose right now we want to distribute the flowers. So just select from grass and let's select again flowers. Nothing will be visible yet because we need to take this instance and plug it to the joint geometry and bam, just by doing a couple of clicks, we distributed right now the grass, the only thing that I need to address is, as I mentioned, the density. So that's why I'm going to drag this number is slightly down to something like 0.01 or let's try 0.005. I don't want the flowers to be really, really dense like right now. And maybe you can change the seed to get a different variation. And yeah, this is, I think looking pretty good if I hit Control Space bar, this is the result we're getting and I think it is looking good. After doing this, let's distribute right now some rocks, which is the exact same technique basically by selecting all of these nodes Control Shift D to duplicate it. And let's, instead of using flowers, Let's use the rocks. They will not be visible because we need to take the instances and also plug it to the joint geometry. Still not that visible because we might need to change, first of all, the scale and the other thing we might also need to change slightly the density maximum from here. So let's try, for example, 0.01 and something is wrong. Well, I'm actually changing the flowers element because it is actually right here flowers. So let's bring this number to where it used to be 0.05. And let's move to the rock elements. So let's just select this label and rename it to rocks. Bring this density maximum to something like 0.1, which will give you a result looking like this. And the first thing I noticed is that I do have a lot of rocks and that's not looking good. So I need to play slightly with all of these different values. And the first thing, let's bring this scale to actually the density maximum to something like 0.005, which is the exact same value that I used for the flowers. And maybe bring this scale slightly up, like for example, from 30. 15. Adding Trees: Alright, so this is where we stopped last time. And to distribute the trees, we will use the exact same technique that we used before, which is basically by duplicating one of these node groups. And we will only change the collection right here from rocks to trees. So let's just do that first things first, let me copy all of these nodes, or let's say duplicate them by hitting Control Shift D, which will basically duplicate while keeping the links. And after doing this, Let's rename this label from rocks to trees by hitting F2, let's call it trees. And let's also change the collection from rocks to trees. And right now, we will not see anything because as you probably remember, we need to connect this instance on points node to the joint geometry. And right now they're not connected, so we're not seeing anything. But actually, if you remember, one thing that I always mentioned is that before you connect any kind of elements or any kind of particle system, I would highly recommend that you bring first of all, this density maximum two lower number. So you avoid introducing a lot of calculation to Blender, which my car, the software to crash. So what I'm going to do first of all is to bring this number down to something like 0. And now I will be able basically to connect this on points to the joint geometry node, which is right here. So let's just connect it. Nothing is visible. So let's start bringing the number up from here and the density maximum and make sure also you are in the tree label. And let's bring this number to something like 0.001 and hit Enter and just wait for the result to compute. Right now we're introducing a lot of calculation to Blender, and this is the result that you will get. The first thing I notice is that the size of all of these trees is so huge. So we need to address that issue, which is actually as easy as just going through this random value which is connected to the scale. And let's bring the scale down to something like for the minimum, let's say something like seven and for the maximum to something like eight. And I think that this is more suitable for the look we're looking for. And actually one thing that you will notice is that basically blender for whatever reason, is muting the branches of the trees on their own and the leaves on their own, even though they're supposed to be connected to see this better if we zoom right here, or let's say right here, the branches of the tree are not linked to the leaves. The reason for this problem is actually pretty simple. If I enable the tree collection from here just so we understand what's happening. And I'm going to open the trees right here. You will have all of your different trees. And one thing that you will notice that inside every object which is the tree, there is another object called the leaves. And basically what we did is that these leaves are parented, are connected or they are children of this big object which is a tree. So the leaves are children of the trees. And if I jump to my ground element right here, one thing that you will notice, actually in the collection info that we're using to reference the trees, there is an option called separate children, which means that a blender will separate the children from their parents. Alright, sounds really weird. But what I mean is that basically Blender will clear all the relations between the different objects so it will separate the leaves from the trees. So to tell blender that hey, consider the hierarchy or let's say keep the relations between the different objects. We need to uncheck this option. So blender will keep the relations between the different elements. And by doing this, when Blender will distribute the trees, it will distribute the trees with all the elements that are inside them or the elements that are parented to them. And right now, our trees are looking the right way. So right now I need to address a small creative decision that I decided to take this shot, which is that I don't want any elements or any sort of trees that are in front of the camera, which mean that I don't want to have any sort of tree is right here. And I only want to have trees somewhere right here on the background. So somehow if I hit seven to nine, jump to the top view. This means that all of these trees that are right here will be hidden. And I only want to have trees right here. And it is pretty similar to the technique that we used before, which means that we need to figure out a way to tell blender that, hey, put some tree is right here and don't put any trees right here. And this actually begs to use some weight painting. I really want to show you this technique because it is a slightly different workflow than the workflow that we use to do to basically limit the distribution of the elements only on the top surface, which has we called height mask. So here's what we will do. We need to create a weight paint map that will tell blender where to put each element are actually how to distribute these trees. So let's just make this whole thing slightly bigger. And just for the sake of making everything a little bit easier to work with, I'm going to jump back to the viewport shading. And let's jump right here from object mode to the weight paint mode. And to make everything easier, let's just disable the geometry node and a subdivision surface. And let's jump to the vertex group right here. And let's create another group. And let's call it, for example, trees. Density. Alright, perfect. So right now as you probably remember, the blue and the weight paint mean that a density of 0. And what we need to do is basically to just paint over the areas where we want the trees to be. So let's just hit seven. And in your tool settings, make sure that you're drawing with a weight of one. And when you will start painting, it would basically be painting with red, which means a density of one. And all we have to do is basically to just paint over the areas that are in the background. So let's just do that pretty quick. Alright, so this is the result I'm having right now. And actually to see everything better, you can enable the viewport overlay from here, which will show you exactly where the elements will be. As you can see, I'm pretty satisfied with this weight paint. So let's just jump back from the weight paint to the object mode. And let's enable all the different modifiers, the subdivision and the geometric note modifier. And the most important thing right now is that we need to use this weight paint or this vertex group to influence how blender is distributing the trees in this distributed points on faces node. So here's what we will be doing from here, which is basically trees label. I'm going to bring this density down to 0, so I will be able to work faster in Blender. I'm going to cut this link, which is the density factor. And I'm going to take it and actually plug it to the output, which is this node right here called the group input. So let's just put it right here and you will have something called density factor. So let's rename that by hitting N. And if you jump to group, Let's change its name from, for example, from density factor to something like three density and hit N again to close the sidebar. And if you jump right now to the Modifiers tab, and in your geometry node modifier, you will have here this slider called tree density, which is right now it is the exact slider as the one right here in the tree label. This exact slider is right now, right here, right now, it is easier to control it, but that's not actually what we want. We need to input some sort of a weight map to this. The really nice thing is that you will have this small icon which looked like a spreadsheet. And if you click on it, you will be able to select from here different attributes related to this object. In our case, if you remember, we created a vertex group called tree density, which does have the weight map that we draw. So we can reference this right here. And if I choose, for example, tree density blender, right now we'll use this map to influence our density factor. And if you remember, wait, map right here is red and right here is blue, which means that a blender will only distribute the trees on the areas that used to be painted in red. Nothing is visible yet because I drop the density maximum down to 0. And before I do that, I really want to be able to control the intensity of the weight map. What I mean if I just jump back quickly to the weight paint, you will notice that I do have right here a red color, which means a density factor of one. But I actually want to be able to control that, for example, I don't want it to be, for example, one, I wanted, for example to be 0.1. So to do such thing, we can add the math node before the density factor. So let's just do that by going shift a, and let's look for math right here. Change the operation from add to multiply. Let's bring the second value to 0, and let's connect it before the density factor right here. Let me just move these slightly so it will be easier to understand. And let's also jump back to the object mode. After doing this, I'm going to change the density maximum to the default value we used to have, which is 0.001. Nothing is visible yet because right now the moment I will start changing this value, I will start the basically adding more and more trees. And just as a general recommendation right now, makes sure to save your file just in case blender crashes. And let's start with a low number. Let's say something like 0.01. We'll have a couple of trees right here. Let's crank this number to something like 0.1 and you will have something looking like this. And just to see everything easier, Let's jump to the rendered view. I think we still can add a little bit more trees. So let's try 0.2. I think we still can add more trees. Let's try 0.3. And yeah, I think that basically this is looking pretty good. I think right now you're seeing why I'm basically getting everything zeros so I don't see anything. And I start bringing the numbers gradually because it is pretty easy like to input a huge number right here and it will crush the software immediately. So that's why I always recommend, especially when you're dealing with heavy nodes, to always start experimenting with low values and then start basically increasing them slowly. So you don't introduce a lot of heavy computing to your computer. And speaking of that, there is really nice and handy option they added in the geometry node, which is that if you go right here on the overlays, you will have this option called timing. And if you click on it, Blender will basically tell you how much time a node is needed to compute. For example, in our case, if I jump to the joint geometry, you will notice that these joint geometry two millisecond to compute. And our final result is taking 0.142 seconds or 142 millisecond. They might not be the most accurate values to be honest, because definitely this scene is taking over a couple of seconds to compute bad. They will give you at least an idea of what are the nodes that are causing some slowed down on your computer. So that's a really nice option in case you're wondering what nodes are, what nodes groups are actually slowing down your geometry node tree. By doing this, we distributed all the different elements for our landscape. And we distributed all of them just by using the geometric nodes. I think it was not that complicated. And believe me, if you start basically experimenting on all of these geometric node workflow, you will find that it is actually way much easier than just using the particle system in blender. That's it for me with this video and I will see you at the next one where we will add the final touches to our composition basically by adding some trees on the foreground and adding a sky. So yeah, See you there. 16. Sky and foreground trees: Hello and welcome. In this video, we will add the final elements to our scene and basically started finalizing it. So yeah, let's just do that. Alright, so this is where we stopped last time. And one thing I'm going to do actually is to, to just disable the geometry nodes modifier so that I will basically have a faster workflow right now. The first thing I'm going to do is basically to add a skyline to our scene. And it is actually as easy as just importing an image of a sky. So let's just go Shift a and let's look for image import images, Images as Planes. And in the resources folder you will have this sky texture. So I'll just double-click on it. Probably it will be really, really small because of the size of our scene is so huge. So make sure you're selecting your sky texture, then jump to the object properties. And let's bring this scale to something like 500. It is still pretty small. Let's try 750, or let's just try straight 1 thousand. Let's hit seven to jump to the top view, hit G to move it, hit Y to only move it on the y-axis. Let's put it somewhere right here, four and the background, it is still pretty small right now. So let's bring the scale to something like 3 thousand. I know it feels right now like somehow we're working with astronomical units. That is not a big deal. Let's hit G, Z to only move it on the z-axis and bring it a little bit up. And actually surprisingly it is still pretty small. So let's crank this scale to something like 4 thousand. And yeah, you will have something looking like this. Try to basically hood it's something like this. And just to see everything better or less jumped to the shader editor from here. And basically blunder will automatically create this material for you called Sky texture. I don't need the Alpha, so I'm going to get disconnected and I'm actually going to take the color and plug it to the emission. This is a trick I learned which will make the sky looks slightly neater. Let's bring the roughness up and the specular down. Let's hit our acts and just rotate it slightly like this. So basically right now the upper areas will be closer to us and that's more of the behavior of the sky. You will notice that there is some clipping right now happening right here, but it is pretty easy to fix. Just hit G, Y and just move it slightly forward until you have a result looking like this. Another thing I like to do in the object properties under visibility, re visibility, make sure to uncheck shadow volumes, scatter transmission glossy. And the other thing I might want to do actually is to introduce a little bit of blue color sky. So to do this, let me just bring this guy texture right here, and I need to add a curves before, after this guy texture. So to do this, let me bring this slightly app to have more space right here. And let's go Shift a and let's look for curves. The almighty RGB curves before I connect it hit control on the sockets so that I will move this right here and then take the color and plug it to color and to introduce a little bit of blue, there are two options. Either you can move to the blue and bring it a little bit up, or another technique which is basically by lowering the reds slightly like this. Let's say something like this and also reducing the green. I mean, it is always good to think differently. And yeah, I think that this is actually looking better. And if I hit M to mute this RGB curves, this is before, this is the after, this is before, and this is the after. And I think it is looking slightly better. The other thing that I also, I will notice right now is that I will probably need some background mountains right here. So to do this, Let's hit seven and hit the Shift and the right mouse button and click to basically move the 3D cursor right here. We will basically add some background with mountains. And to do this, it is as easy as just using, again the ANT landscape. So go shift a look for mesh landscape. Nothing is visible the head because it is probably so small. This is our element right now, let's change the operator preset to mountain one. You will have something looking just like this. For the noise size, I'm going to input 0.8, depth of eight, a dimension of 1 to an electronegativity of 2.4. And this will give you a result looking like this. The only thing I'm going to do is basically to actually sub-divide it a little bit more. Let's say 256, which will give you something looking like this. And I want to basically make this whole formation slightly longer so it basically can fill this horizon line. So from the down menu right here on the falloff, make sure to change it from x and y. Just change it to y. And this will basically make this mountain formation continuous. And right now, it is actually as easy as just bringing this mesh size on the x-axis slightly to something, let's say like ten. You will have something looking like this. And maybe you can also bring the mesh size on the y to something like seven. And this will give you a result looking like this. I think it is a little bit too much, so let's try three. And yeah, this is the result we're getting right now and I kinda like it to be honest. Another thing also that you can probably do right here is that you can change the size to something like 1.3 because there will be a little bit of stretching happening because we are scaling the whole thing on the x-axis. So by introducing some slightly bigger size on the y-axis will at least give us a better result. Will somehow reduce a little bit this stretching. And after doing this, we need to UV unwrap our model. So just hit tab and just hit you and select and wrap, wait for the model to unwrap and bam, it is done right now. So hit tab again to exit the edit mode, and it is time to scale this whole thing up until it filled the horizon. So I can scale it from here, but I'm actually going to scale it from the object properties. And let's try something like 50. Well, it's not visible yet. I think our scene is so huge. So let's try 500, let's try 7750. Alright, this is looking pretty good and I think I might want actually to scale it a little bit up on the z-axis. So let's hit S, Z and scale it a little bit on the z-axis and maybe bring this whole scale a little bit down until you get a result looking. And just like it is right now, all we have to do is basically to add a material for this. I'm not going to bother basically by creating a different material for it and all of that. So I'm just going to use the same exact material that I used for this mountain. So let's select in the shader editor, make sure also you're selecting your background mountain. Let's select the material called Mountain. And the first thing that you will notice is that everything will go crazy because we're using some sort of a displacement of this material. So let's address that pretty quickly. And the easiest way basically to fix this issue is basically by lowering the displacement. But by doing that, we will also change this result for the main mountain. So to fix this issue, it, it will be easier basically to create a different material. Simply all you have to do is to click on this new material icon, which will create an exact copy of this material. So let's rename it to something like a mountain underscore back ground. Now let's lower down the subdivision two, pretty low number, let's say like one for now, it's still pretty intense. So let's try 0.01. And I think that this actually will suit better. A look we're looking for. And actually speaking of that, if you remember to this main mountain, we added actually ie, a displacement modifier. So let's add the same exact modifier also to this one. And it is actually as easy as just selecting this background mountain shift, select the main mountain, hit Control L, and you will have an option called copy modifiers. So just click on it. It will turn everything to a blob because of the displacement modifier. So let's address this issue. And actually before I do anything that if you remember, I actually forgot to apply the scale. So hit Control a and apply the scale. We will have a result looking like this. And I think by doing that, our result will look somehow fine, I think, and is looking pretty good in my opinion. The only thing actually I might do is to try and scale this whole thing for the displacement. Let's try 0.1. And yeah, I think that it is looking pretty good. I might actually also hit S, Z and scale up a little bit on the z-axis, little bit more scalable thing, and hit Control a and apply the scale whenever you change the scale of your mountain. And all we have to do is basically to rename this whole thing to background mountain and hit Enter. Alright, perfect. So right now we filled our background with some mountains and the sky. So the last thing we're going to address is basically the foreground elements. And for this, I will enable again my geometry node modifier on the ground object. Let's just enable it. This will give you a result looking like this. And basically what I want is to add some trees right here in the foreground. This will be super easy. Basically, lemon just bring this slightly down to have more space in my outliner. And I'm going to create a new collection and let's call it F G trees. And I'm going to take two trees from this collection called trees. Let's see the first tree by selecting it and hitting the dot. This is our first tree, and this is our second tree. Let's select this one and this one hit control C and move to every trees and hit Control V. Perfect. And we basically copied both of these trees to a new collection. Let me disable again this trees. And for these two trees, I'm actually going to move them through the foreground. So let's just select them. Had seven to jump to the top view. And where is my scene? It is right here, my camera. So let's just move this whole thing right here. Zoom in a little bit and just scale the whole thing way, way bigger and maybe hit our Z to rotate it until they look something like this. Let's scale them up. We will have two trees right here. And the whole thing, it is actually as easy as just trying to frame this whole scene using this trees to create some sort of frame. So let's select the first tree. This one hit G to move it slightly on the x axis until it looks something like this. Maybe you can rotate it a little bit on the z-axis. Maybe you'll get a different result. Alright, I think that this is looking pretty good and maybe also like this one, g x right here. Also, if you want it to look like it is somehow falling, maybe you can scale it and let it sit down and hit R and rotated a little bit on the y-axis, something just like this. Alright, perfect. So this is, our tree is right now that will be on the foreground. And I'm digging this, the result, actually I think it is looking pretty good. I might say, Hey, that the tree is looks so huge, but it is not a big deal. And actually just for the sake of making everything easier, I'm going to select this camera up. And if you scroll down in the camera properties, you will have right here in the Viewport display. Let's bring the scale to something like ten meter. So basically I will be able to see my camera easily. Let's even try it 50 meter. So this is our camera right now. And yeah, this is the result we're getting and we're almost there. The only thing that we might want actually to add is basically some fog planes to kind of add more depth to our scene and will be done after that. So yeah, see you in the next video where we will create some fog planes. 17. Adding fog planes: Hello and welcome. In this new video, where we will basically add some fog planes to our scene. So to add some fog planes, which basically will add some more depth. As I mentioned, it is actually as easy as first of all, creating a plane. So let's go shift a mesh plane to be really small because I was seen as so huge. So let's bring the scale to something 1 thousand. So it is pretty huge right now. Hit our x two, only rotate it on the x-axis, and let's hit 90. Basically what you want is for this plane to cover the entire frame. So let's even scale the whole thing a little bit more until it cover, let's say something like this. Hit Control a and apply the scale hit F2 to rename this object. And let's call it, for example, fog underscore plane. And we need to add a material to this. So here's what we will do. I'm going to hit the Tilde key to only focus on object. And I'm going to also pause my render right here and enable the render right here. Or actually I will need to enable it in both views. So let's just jump to the solid view right here. Perfect. And I need to create a material for this. So make sure you are in the shader editor. Click on New. Let's bring this slightly up. And right here, actually there are just two options that we need to worry about, which is the base color and the Alpha. So basically a fog Blaine will look something white right here, which will gradually fades out, or let's say gradient from white to transparent. So I mentioned the word gradient, which means that I will need a gradient texture. Let's look for gradient texture and we need to add a mapping setup to it. So make sure you are selecting your gradient texture and just hit Control T or Control Shift and click on your gradient texture to see how it will look like. And it will look something like this, which is not exactly what we want. We want the black to be on top and the y to be on the bottom. So all you have to do is to rotate it on the z-axis, let's say 90 degree to look something like this. But if you bring the location to one on the x-axis, you will have something looking like this, which you will have basically a gradient going from white to black. White will be visible, black will be not visible. And if you take the color and plug it also to the alpha, notice what will happen. Alright? Nothing will happen for whatever reason. Alright, because I'm not seeing the principal P, S, D, F. So Control Shift and click on the principle be SDF. And as you can see, the upper part is right now kind of transparent and you kinda see the checker texture behind it. But we need to tell blender that, Hey, we want the transition to happen somewhere right here. And to do this, it is actually as easy as just adding a math node and setting up the operation from add to power. And if I Control Shift and click on the Power node and a sub bringing this number, what is that? I'm basically able to move the location of this gradient the way I want. So maybe let's put it somewhere in the middle, 5.5 and Control Shift and click on your principle-based df. This is the result we're getting and I kinda like it. And for the base color, make sure it is actually white. And if you're doing this, we're ready right now to put a couple of these fog planes on our scene. So let's hit the tilde key again to jump back to the view of our scene. And let's also maybe jump back to the solid view. And let's jump right here to the rendered view. Right now, our plant is probably covering a large part of the scene. So let's hit G, z and move it slightly down until you get something maybe looking like this. And maybe let's also duplicate it right here between the main mountain and the background mountains. And just for the sake of making everything easier in the object properties and or visibility in the viewport display, make sure to change from textured to wire, which will basically just give you this kind of frame, which will basically will make everything easier to work with so that we can see through this blame. It's seven to jump to the top view. And let's hit Shift D to duplicate it and put it right here on the background. And one thing that you will notice, it is actually smaller than the frame, so hit S and scale it a little bit up and maybe also hit G, z and move it a little bit on the z-axis until you get a result looking like this. And as you can see, it just adds a little bit more depth to the scene by adding woods like there is some sort of haze in the scene or something like that, which I think looks pretty good. And yet by doing this, our scene is finished. And in the next couple of videos, well, basically finalize it and just make it ready for rendering. So yeah, see you in the next video. Bye everyone. 18. Rendering layers: Hello and welcome. In this video, we will organize our scene and break it down to different rendering layers so that everything will be easier for computer to render. Alright, so to do this, I'm going to bring this slightly down so I will have more space in my outliner. And basically, I want to move all of these different assets, like the flowers, the grass, rocks, and trees do their own collection which will be called assets. So let's create a new collection and let's call it assets. And I'm going to select all of these and just move them to assets. I'm going to disable it and enable all the ones inside it. So whenever I need it, I will be able to enable all of these different elements just by clicking on this one instead of like basically enabling each one on its own. So let's just minimize it. And there is a really nice option, which is that you can hit the right mouse button and change its color to something like green. So I will know that, hey, this is actually assets and actually maybe we can change the color of all of these also to green. So I know that this will be our assets collection, which actually surprisingly, we will not render it. After that. I'm going to work a little bit on my foreground elements. So to do this, I'm actually going to create a new collection and let's call it for ground. And what are the things that I will need on this foreground? First of all, I'm going to move the lake to the foreground because it will render with the foreground also the trees, which are these ones right here. And here's one thing that you always need to know is that you will always need to select all the things that are inside an object that you move all of them. So let's just select them and move them to foreground. Let's select both of them and hit M to move them to a new collection, new collection, let's call it a veggie trees and just hit, Okay, Let's also move the leaves inside the collection so that they're not left behind. Perfect, and make sure it is actually inside for ground. This extra trees which we created before we need to rename it to, let's say, fog planes. And let's get back this to every trees. Alright, so for the fog planes, I'm going to leave them on their own collection main mountain. Let's leave it on its own for the sky, I'm actually going to move it to a new collection by hitting M and New Collection and let's call it the sky and hit Okay, let's minimize it. Alright, so for the background mountain, I'm going to rename this collection to back ground mountain. And I'm actually going to move the camera to the scene collection so it doesn't belong to any collection. And let's just minimize this. And by doing this, we will have a collection for each different elements. And right now it is about time to basically start breaking down the scene two different layers before our break it down to different layers. Here's what we will do. The first layer, which is we're in right now, I'm going to call it master, which will basically contain the whole scene together in case I need to work on it a little bit more than I'm going to click on this and just hit Copy Settings. And I'm going to call this for this guy, as you probably already guessed it. I'm only going to enable the sky collection. And if I just jumped to the rendered view, this will be the sky later. Let's create another one, copy settings. And right now, let's rename this to background mountains. And I only want to see the background mountains right here. So let's just enable the background mountains. And actually one thing I just remember is that the fog planes also need to be visible. And actually I only need the fog plane 001. So that's why I'm actually going to move this to background mountain. I'm going to disable this collection and you will have something looking like this. So this will basically be my background mountains. Right now we will move to the main mountain. So click on this Copy Settings and let's call this main mountain. And from here, as you guessed it, that's enabled main, main mountain. And also I need to enable this fog plane, which actually I will move to the main mountain and just hit Delete for this frog plane because we don't need it. So our focal plane, one of them would be in the main mountain and one of them is in the background mountain because one of them is in front of the background mountains and the other one is in front of the main mountain. So it will make more sense if we render each plane with the mountains behind it. So this will be our main mountain and it is looking pretty good. Let's create another layer Copy Settings. And this one will be for the four ground. And right here, I will enable my foreground collection, which will have all of these elements right here. And after doing this, we need to jump to our composite or to set it up. So let's move to compositor check Use nodes, and we will use a bunch of file woods to render the scene. Let's just jumped to the viewport shading and I'm going to hit Control Space bar to maximize the compositor because we don't need actually right now to see the whole thing in the viewport. And the first thing I'm going to do is basically to actually cut this link and dilute this composite. And all you have to do is basically to select the layer that you want to render from here and where you want to save it. So here's what we will do. First of all, we need to denoise our render, because as you probably remember in the first video, probably right here in the render passes, we actually enabled de-noise data. So we need to use this using data to improve our renders. So to do this, we need a denoising node. So go Shift a and let's look for de-noise. And it is as easy as plugging the image, image normal to the normal and albedo, albedo. And let's add a file output. Let's plug it right here. Just make it slightly bigger. Click on this and basically just select where you want to save your render. In my case, I'm going to save it right here and I'm going to create a new folder and let's call it render. Just hit Accept. And if you want actually to rename your render, you will have to hit Enter to open the sidebar. And under node properties, you will be able to change right here the name of the file, the first layer that we will be rendering. It is actually the sky. So from here, let's call it sky. And for the file format that we will save our project on, I'm not going to use PNG, but actually I'm going to use Open XR. Yes, it will give us a huge file sizes, but it is not a big deal because we will only work with images. We're not basically creating an animation where we will have a lot of images and we might worry about storage because we're only working basically just using a couple of images that we will blend together. We need as much as possible data as possible. So that's why I'm going to use Open XR and just leave all the different settings the way they are. And after doing this, it is as easy as just selecting all of these nodes, hit Shift D to duplicate the whole thing. Let's change from sky to background mountains. And also for this node makes sure to change it to back ground and rescore the mountains. Now, select all of these, hit Shift D. Let's rename from background mountains two main mountain renamed the result of this file output to, let's say main mountain hit Shift D. And let's finally choose foreground. And let's rename this to four ground perfect. So this is basically our rendering no tree for the compositor. And in the next video, we'll basically just change a couple of Render Settings here and there. And after that, we will be ready to render the scene. Yeah. See you in the next video. Bye everyone. 19. Rendering settings: Hello and welcome. In this video, we'll, we'll change a couple of render settings to optimize our scene for rendering. So, yeah, let's just do that. So this is where we stopped last time, basically by building the compositor no tree that we will use for rendering. And let's just get back to our normal view by hitting Control Spacebar to minimize our editor. And let's change a couple of render settings. First of all, the render settings right here, and make sure you're on cycle experimental GPU compute for the Render Settings. I'm going actually to render the scene a 256. Some people might seem a little bit too much. It is not a big deal, as I said, because we're only rendering one image. So yes, it might take a little bit of time to render that is just one image so you can wait for it until render and then you will be done. I'm going to disable this denoising option because I'm already using a denoising node right here. And other than that, let me jump back to cost X. I don't need neither reflective, neither refractive. And yeah, this is looking pretty good. I'm not going to change anything else. After finishing with the Render Settings, I'm going to jump to the view layer properties. And from here, I'm going to change a couple of settings may only if you scroll down, you will have here an option called override. And basically override will basically allow you to choose different rendering sample to each layer. For example, if I jumped to the sky, my render sample right here is actually 256, which is actually true for rendering is, it is a little bit overkill. So that's why when you jump right here, you will be able to select a different rendering samples, each layer. For example, this guy, I think it will be good even with 32 for the background mountains, I'm going to leave it at 256. Same thing for the main mountain. Let's leave it at 256. And for the foreground, I actually might even bring this slightly up to something like 512 because they need more details on the foreground. The other thing also that I, as I promised you, which is basically we will use missed past to kinda create some fog in our scene. So to do this, let's just jump to our master. And from here, I'm actually going to enable the messed pairs for this one. And I'm going to also scroll down and let's choose a low sample. Let's say something like 32. We don't need a lot of sense for this because we will only need it for the midst pass. And if you jumped to your camera properties, you will have here an option and are viewport display for missed. If you click on it, you will have a line that will show right here in your camera. And if I just change its location to understand better what it will do, let me jump to the world settings or properties. And right here you will have an option called Miss fast. So basically the mess There's, will generate a picture that like the one you're seeing right now, which it will help me later to blend it with the render to kind of add more fog. So basically the start in depth, like the following. The start will basically tell blender at which distance blender should start calculating the midst pairs. And the depth is basically the final point where it will be basically fully white or fully opaque. We can see anything. So to do this, let's change the star to a high number. Let's say something like, let's say that the fog will start basically around here. So let's just move it in the star to somewhere right here, 350 meter. And the whole scene will be fully opaque in a depth of, let's say 3 thousand meter. Let's try actually 5 thousand meter. Yeah, I think that this will be good to start off 350 meter and a depth of 5 thousand meters or five kilometers. And we also need to save this. So it is actually super easy. And all you have to do is basically to just select one of these node groups. It Shift D to duplicate it, and let's change it to master. We don't need this de-noise, so hit Control X and all you have to do is basically to take the midst and plug it to the sky. And in this file output, make sure to rename it to missed an. After doing this, I think we're ready to go and all you have to do is basically to go file and save just in case. And just right now basically go to Render and render image. We have to do basically is wait for blender to render. And I will see you in the next video where we will finish this whole image. See you there. 20. Compositing Part I: Hello and welcome. And in this final video will basically compose our shots. So let's just do that. One of the things that I always like to do is basically to start a fresh blenders scene so that basically I don't work on an already have a file. So by creating a fresh blender file, I will basically have a quicker workflow, Let's say at the end of the day it doesn't matter because right now we're starting to deal with images and we don't need all the chaos of the 3D models. So just start fresh blender file and directly I'm going to click here and just jumped to compositing because that's what we will be doing after doing this, basically make sure to check, Use nodes and delete both of these two nodes because we don't need them x and to delete them. And maybe let me just minimize this and hit End to hide this sidebar. After doing this, we need right now to import our images. And to do this, there are two different approaches. The easiest one will be basically to just drag and drop them from your explorer or just go Shift a. And if you look for image, you will be able to have this node and you click on Open. And right here just for example, let's start with this guy. I'm going to open the sky now, maybe hit Shift D to duplicate this, click on open the background mountains Shift D to duplicate it again, open main mountain Shift D again, open ls choose for ground shift D again open, Let's open the message pass that took some time. Now here's the important thing you always should think of the hierarchy of all the different elements. Because the way of how noodle compositing work is basically by putting the farthest element, basically in the bag and work your way basically to the foreground elements, just like you're seeing right now. So we need to put these background mountains over the sky. So to put one element over another, we will need a node called Alpha over as the name states. So go a and let's look for alpha. And I wrote sulfur Alpha over, which is this node right here. And basically what this node will do, it will overlay the second image over the first image. So I'm going to connect this guy to the first image and connect this to the second socket. And if I Control Shift and click on this, you will have something looking like this. And one annoying thing that always bugs me is that you can basically zoom in on this picture by scrolling the mouse wheel. So you need to hit V if you want to zoom out. And let's maybe just put it right here so we always can see it. And yeah, basically this is the result of that you will get and also make sure to check convert pre-multiplied. If you don't check it, some weird stuff will start to happen. And now after doing this, we will put the main mountains over that. So Shift D, Let's put it here. I'm going to take the main mountain. Let's put it here, shift D again, and let's put the foreground elements right here. And this is our render. For now I'm going to leave the midst pairs because I might use it, I might not, but let's just leave it there for now in case we need it. And in the next video where we'll add the final effects to this composite. So yeah, see you in the next video. 21. Compositing Part II: So this is where we stopped last time. And let's just do our final adjustments to this. I'm going to try and make this composite as easy as possible. I'm not going to go super technical right now because at the end of the day there are limited stuff that you can do inside a blender compositor. And to be honest, I just want to show you how you can use some features that the blender composite or can offer. One thing that I always like to do because the setup of this composite or in Blender is a little bit so weird. I'm going to select all of these nodes. And if you hit age, you will basically minimize them. And I don't need to see basically everything because I already see the name of the files are actually the name of the nodes. So it will be easier like this to see how the whole tree is connected. Let's say. Another option you might find it useful. Basically, if you check this magnet right here, all of these nodes will stick to this grid. And I always like to make them super organized. So what I like to do is basically to apply some general adjustments to the whole image. And if I notice some problems related to a certain element, I will address that element on its own. But right now, let's just adjust the settings, all the different elements, which means that we will add some nodes right here at the end of the node tree. The first thing that I always like to do is basically to go Shift a and add a curves, RGB Curves Adjustment Layer or actually note, sorry, and it is under this mismatch. So I'm just going to put this bad boy right here. And what I'm going to do is basically to crank a little bit the contrast of this file to something just like you're seeing right now. I think that this is looking good. And one thing I will notice is that there is some like really yellowish tint which actually you can address in multiple ways. Maybe some people might suggest to reduce, for example, the red, which will solve that problem quite there yet. So what I'm going to do is basically to just minimize also this node. And I'm going to add another node after that, which is called hue, correct? And if I take this and put it right here, I will be able to change the saturation of each color, which means that, for example, we feel like this picture is to yellowish, yellowy and to orangey, let's say. So we might just drag all of these colors that are right here slightly down. And as you can see, I will be able to change only the saturation of these elements. So what I'm going to do is basically to just drop the saturation a notch until it looks slightly better. In general, I do really love the desaturated look, but at the end of the day, it is up to you and your style and the things that you prefer. And basically by doing this, we fixed the issue related to that orange button that were in the picture before. That's also minimize this and maybe even let's put it underneath this. And right now let's add another RGB curve, which I'm going to use to grade this image. So I'm just going to put this bad boy right here, and let's just start adjusting some colors. And actually, I'm going to put it slightly here so I can see my image. I'm going to boost a little bit of blues to the sky. So you can boost the blue's either by adding blues or you can reduce both the red and green thing differently as they say, I'm going to reduce a little bit of red from the highlights and a little bit of olive green from the highlights, something like this. And maybe let's boost some blues in the highlights. Or actually maybe let's create a point in the middle and move this just like so. Let's get back to the reds. Maybe let's just lower them slightly. Alright. I feel like I'm not getting exactly what I'm looking for just by using this RGB curves. I'm just going to minimize it and put it right here. And let's just change some settings only for the sky. So to do this, where is our sky node, which is this bad boy right here. So let's go here. Let's add a curve and let's maybe boost a little bit of contrast to the sky to make it more moody, more scary, something like so. And let's reduce the reds, which will give you something looking like this. Alright, That's not bad, I guess, kind of work. I might also actually drop the saturation a little bit down. So go Shift a and let's look for saturation. You use iteration value, Let's put it right here, and let's drop the saturation to something like 0.9 or 0.7. Yeah, that's better. Minimize it and let's put it right here. And I might actually also add a hue and saturation value also at the end of my notary. So let's a and let's look for hue saturation value. Let's put it here and I'm going to drop the saturation to something like 0.9. And if you play actually a little bit with the hue, you might get some cool stuff happening. In my case, I feel like if I reduce this to something like 0.48, there is this light orangey, pinky color cast that will start happening. I kinda like it. So I'm just going to leave it there. Again. This is just self preference and actually a more into showing you what you can do and then compositor more than actually getting a really good result. Because compositing can be time-consuming, especially when you're trying to dial different settings. Nodes. If you hit M for this node, this is the before and this is the after, this is the before and this is the after. And I kind of prefer the result with this hue and saturation node. I might even actually drop the saturation something like 0.8. And this is the result we're getting. I know it is a little bit too desaturated, but that's what I'm going for. Another thing that you might also want to address is that if you notice right here, if you hit Alt V, you will be able to zoom in on this picture. Where is my viewer? Select your viewer. I'm just going to move this slightly right here. Basically there is some space right here happening. And probably that's because we didn't notice it when we were working in 3D. But this is the issue that you can fix easily when doing compositing because it is as easy actually as just scaling the foreground elements a little bit up. And we will basically have that artifact happening right there. Where is my foreground? It is right here for ground. And all you have to do is edit transform, node transform. Let's put it here. Let's change the scale to something like 1.15 O we've seen how did you figure out that? Well, because I did that before and let's just bring it a little bit up on the y-axis just slightly until we hide artifact happening right here, something like so. And this is looking pretty good. Let's just minimize this and put it beneath the foreground. Alright, then the last thing that I'm going to do is basically to add some camera imperfections, which is basically as the name states some artifacts or some imperfection that does happen because of how we use cameras in real life, like lens distortion and all of those steps. First things first, I'm going to add a blur node like Bueller. And you might wonder why am I adding this? Because generally the renders that comes out of 3D softwares are really sharp and they doesn't look that good. So I always like to add like for example, one, the blur node to just make it slightly, a little bit more blurry, it will help us along the way. Let's minimize this node. This is the first imperfection. And after that, I'm going to also add a vignette. The vignette is basically the darker edges that will happen on the edge of the screen. And to do this, just go Shift a and let's look for ellipse mask, which is this bad boy right here. And if you hit Control Shift and click on it, this is the mask we're having. I'm going to bring the width up to something like this and the height to something like this. This is our mask, and right now it is super sharp so we need to blur it. So go Shift a and let's add a blur node. Let's put it here and let's blur it to something like 500. Perfect. And maybe let's just try 400 to just make it a little bit more darker, I will stick to this result. And right now we need to figure out a way of how to apply these black and white mask to our image. And this is actually pretty simple because there is actually a way to do this, which is by multiplying this image with our original image that is coming out of this blur note. And in case you're confused, I'm going to put this right here. Let's go Shift a and let's add a mix and just plug this to the first socket. And let's plug this to this first socket and Control Shift and click on this and nothing is happening. And that's actually a weird problem that a lot of people who face, which is that this ellipse mask, the dimensions we're inputting right here are related to the project settings or to the resolution of the project, which means these width and height actually work in correlation. What a word with this aspect ratio or actually with this resolution 1920 by 1080. But if you remember actually we set up our project settings two to 560, which is slightly more going toward the cinema scope. So if we want everything to work correctly, make sure you change the project settings of this fresh blender file to the same. They mentioned that we used for our scene or to render our scene width and a right now if you hit Control Shift and click on this, this is the result we're getting. And as you can see, there is some sort of clipping happening on the top. So let's just drop down the height, just like so let's see the result after the blur node Control Shift and click on this. This is the result we're getting and Control Shift and click on this and nothing much is happening because we need to change this to multiply. And as you can see, we basically darken the edges of our image. That's pretty cool, right? And in case you want to change the intensity of this black parts, well basically you will need to add a color ramp node after this. So let's go Color Ramp. Let's just put it right here, and let's just choose the black color and raise it a little bit. This will generally make the black less black if that even makes sense. Yeah, This is looking pretty good and let's just put all of these nodes beneath each other so they look neat. And lastly, of course, but not least, is to add the lens distortion, which is the distortion that happens because of lenses in real life. So to do this dedicated node for that, which is called lens distortion. And generally you should use like really small values to distort your image. In my case, I'm going to put 0.01 minus, minus 0.01, which will give you a slightly distortion. And maybe also a 0.001 for the dispersion, which will create the chromatic aberration that might happen on the edges of the screen. That's the minimize this and let's just put it right here. And yet, I would consider this a finished render. As I mentioned before, you probably can spend a little bit more time doing some compositing, maybe even jump in Photoshop, maybe even make it better. But for the sake of keeping everything in Blender, I'm going to stick to this. And also as I mentioned for this video, I'm not trying to basically show you exact values as much as I'm trying to show you the potential and the things that you can do inside of Blender compositor. This is our final node tree and we didn't use our mask paths, but it's not a big deal. You probably just can do it basically by doing Shift D. And let's just plug this right here and choose this screen. And right now we're applying our misspells. It is looking a little bit funky. That's why I'm just going to hit M to mute this node. So basically I'm having everything that is coming out of the lens distortion only, and I'm not going to use it this miss fast. Thank you very much for tuning into how we can create the scene inside of Blender. And yeah, have a great day. See you. 22. Fix A.N.T Landscape Eroder Problem: Hello and welcome. In this video, we will fix a common issue that might happen to some people when using the a and T landscape or erosion tool. Alright, so basically, I'm going to recreate this problem. So imagine you just opened Blender and let me just delete all of these because you have two and let's go Shift a and let's add a landscape element. And when you hit End to open the sidebar and recreate landscape tool. So you will have landscape rotor, and if you click on this, you will have this really annoying problem. And basically it is some problem related to the script. It's not a problem relates to your computer. It is a bug and the add-on. I did some research and it is a common issue that did happen to a lot of people and even under-priced and Blender guru is facing this problem. So we have believed me you're not alone. I did some research and I found the solution for this problem. And it is actually pretty simple. Here's what you will be doing inside the project files of this project. You will have this AT&T Lenski problem fixed. So let's just open it and you will have this AND functions by some file. So just copy this file. And right now we're going to navigate to where we installed blender. This can be if you installed a portable version which is the zip file, or you basically use the usual installer for, for Blender and the beth will be the same. So in my case, I'm going to jump to see, then go to Program Files, Blender Foundation, choose your version of Blender. In my case, I'm going to choose 3.1, go to 3.1 scripts, add-ons and look for ANT landscape. It is right here. And you will have this AND functions, which is the exact same files. Please forget about this because this is my previous attempt to fixing this problem. So here's what you will do. Basically just change the name of the AND functions file that you have. So something like let's say a backup just in case you need it sometime in the future. And let's just hit continue and just go based and continue. And we basically replace that AND function file before, which has corrupted with this new file. Right now, if you close Blender, let me just close it. Don't save and let me just open it again. And right now, if I add my landscape, Let's add landscape and let's jump to the erosion tool. Create landscape. Landscape tools, landscape erosion. It will work the way it is supposed to work. So yeah, this is how you fix that problem. Hope it helped you right now. You need to get back to the course, alright.