Create Realistic Looking 3D Environments in Blender

1. Trailer: Have you ever tried creating a 3D environment and you ended up with the results looking like this. Most people think that in order to create good 3D environments, you need to be some sort of a Node Wizard. And that really sucks seeing and imagining things perfectly in your mind and not being able to achieve those results is really frustrating. But here's the catch. It doesn't need to be like that. There is always a solution and the wavelength and all been there. This course will teach you how to create realistic looking environments in Blender. Firstly, we'll start by learning how to use displacement to create realistic looking terrains. What is displacement, how it works? Shade your drain in order to look realistic used nodes. All of those stuff will be explained thoroughly throughout the course so that you won't have to struggle with these concepts again in the future. Then we will move to add twists to the scene. And instead of wasting your time looking for some good trees on the internet, you will learn how to create your own custom trees easily in Blender. And here's the thing. I will also give you a little secret that will allow you to render millions of trees with no problem. Then we will move on to finalizing our scene. And here's the site, all the stuff that you will learn about shading, lighting, weight painting, how to use geometric ones, which I will promise you, it will be real fun. We will also focus on how you can optimize your scene and how you can add things that you thought that will take a lot of time to render. But there is also a way of how you can do them without increasing your render time, like atmospheric elements. And at last he will learn how you can use layers when it comes to rendering, which will allow you to render any scene in Blender, no matter your computer specs. And we'll finish everything by doing our compositing work and harness the power of Blender, composter. And actually you will be surprised at how much you can actually get just using Blender, composter. The goal of this course is to get you up and running when it comes to creating 3D environments and blend. But I think the most valuable thing that you can get out of this course is to learn the logic and the thought process of how you can approach your future projects. And honestly, I don't care that much about the final result that you will get out of this course as much as they want you to learn. The tools and techniques can divorce to take your skills to the next level, which is the thing that made me happy. Now, all of that sounded exciting for you. I cannot wait to see you inside the course 2. Before You Start: Hello and welcome everyone in this first video, where we are going to go over some stuff that you need to put in mind and some assets and add-ons that you will need throughout the course so that all of us will be at the same page and we all have the same settings and the same assets that we will work from. First of all, let's start with Blender. There are a couple of add-on that you will need to activate. So in order to activate your adult mixture, to go to Edit references. And from here make sure to jump to add ons. And there are three add-ons that you need to activate. I'm going to start with the first one. It is really famous add-on. It is called Node Wrangler already activated this add-on by default. So you're probably it will be unchecked, so make sure to check it. The next add-on will be Import Images as Planes. It is this add-on right here. So make sure to activate this add-on. And the third one is called a sapling region, which is this one right here AD curve sapling region, which is basically the unknown that we will use to create our trees basically, at some point in the course, these are the main three add-ons that you will need throughout this course. Make sure that basically you click here and you click Save Preferences and you're good to go. You can close this window. Another thing also, I really hate this toolbar right here, so we will probably find me always like licking the rice mode button and show tool settings. I always try to maximize the area and working in. So that's also really tiny thing I always do just so that I have as much as possible of area in Blender. So yeah, that's basically it for Blender. We will probably get back to adjusting plenty of other settings when it comes to rendering and all of that. But we'll do them in other videos right now. Let's talk a little bit about some assets that you will need to download from the Internet. Now for the terrains that we will use, they're basically free stuff. You can download from this site called NBN CG. All you have to do is basically to go to MBA and cgi.com and just look for terrain. And you will have this terrains, your one, and you will have this drain 03. These are the two ones that we will be using throughout this course. So all you have to do is basically e.g. let's just give an example, terrain 01, I'm going to enter. And from here you will have plenty of different maps that you can download. And what I would recommend is to download the additional maps for KJ JPEG, which is this one right here. This one will have the color or the details of the flow and the protrusion and the soil maps, which we will use later to coal, to color our mountain or to shade our mountain. That's for the additional maps. And you will also need to download this for k. It is called height maps. It is this one right here. It is basically make sure that you download the four K version two that we can squeeze as much as possible of details. You don't need the eight K version. The four K version will work fine for both this terrains or one makes sure to download the additional maps at for k and the height maps at for k. And same thing for terrain zero to make sure that you download the additional maps for k and also the height maps at four K, they shouldn't take that long. And you will probably also find them along with the resources folder in this course, which is the next thing that I'm going to talk about, which is the Assets folder that you can download with this course. Along with this course, you will have the project files folder, which will have two main folders, the assets and the blender projects for the render folder that you can see right here is basically the final render that we will do. But honestly, I don't plan to uploading it along with the project files for one very simple reason, which is that the size of this folder is kind of huge. And honestly I don't want to bog you with basically the need to download a huge project file and all of that just so that you can access the render. But here's the thing in case you want some access to this folder, the render folder just hit me up and I'll make sure to send you a link for it. But in case you're rendering your own stuff, you will have the assets folder and the blender projects folder. In the assets folder, you will basically have plenty of different images, plenty of different textures that we will use throughout this course. You will have the barks for when we're creating the trees. These are for the three planes that we will use as basically to scatter along the scores. You will have the terrains also, these are some extra treated three planes that I created before that you can get for free. And along with the 2D mountains that you can use later on in the background mountain has some lens flare sky image for the seen, the sunrise, which is an HDR, and basically a vignette for the shot in this folder. All the different things that you will find music along the scores at lives in this folder. So this is for the assets folder, you will have also blender projects, which is basically the blend projects that while I was working right now they're a little bit chaotic that you will have them in order in new project files folder. And yeah, that's basically it for the things that you will need to download to start this course with. And yeah, that's basically it for me for this video, make sure to install all the necessary files and texture and all of that. And then we'll see you in the first video. Everyone talk to you there 3. Terrain Creation: Hello and welcome inside of Blender where we will start by creating our terrains, as I just said. So first things first, let's just choose general because that's what we choose and don't say because that's an old scene. After that, I'm actually going to delete this light and this cube x and then delete, and let's add a plane shift a mesh plane. This will be our main terrain and maybe you can hit F2 to rename it to something, let's say like terrain and your score 01. So this is our terrain. And actually if you hit Enter, you can see the dimensions of this plane, which is 2 m by 2 m. Now, usually the landscape scenes are so huge we talk generally in kilometers. But the problem is that blender actually is not that good when it comes to handling scenes with huge scale. And for the majority of the environments that are used to create, I always used to basically just crank this up to something, let's say like 2000 meter or 2 km and just deal basically with working with a huge scenes inside of Blender. But lately I stumbled upon another technique that I would like to show you, which is actually more efficient and make more sense. So I'm actually going to bring this down to 2 m, which is the default value. Let's just have the dark to zoom on it and enter the scene settings. You will find here a tab called units. And under units you will, you will have this unit scale. What is the unit scale? Well, it is basically a multiplier for the scale of your entire scene. So for now, let's say we do have 2 m e.g. for the scale of the spleen, it is multiplied by this unit scale. So let's say e.g. we want it to be 2 km, which means that we will need to multiply this two by 1,000, so it becomes 2,000 m. So if I type right here 1,000, as you will see, basically Blender will adjust its settings like literally all of its settings to adapt to this unit scale. By doing this, as you can see, I don't need to do these crazy scaling objects to astronomical units and all of that. So this is better and more efficient, I guess. And actually if you just jump over this slider, you will find that basically they tell you a small or larger in scale respectively can be used to avoid numerical precision problems. So this is a better option in case you're working with really small scenes, you can bring this number down. And if you're working with huge scenes, you can bring this number up. Anyway, lets our plane, and that's what matters. This is our terrain. And let's start working everyone. The first thing I'm going to do is basically to hit Tab, to jump to the edit mode. And I'm going to sub-divide it a little bit because I'm going to do a displacement modifier. So just hit the right mouse button and let's do sub-divide. If you hit Shift R, you will be able to repeat the last operation you did. The last operation we did, it was subdivided. So if I hit Shift R, I would repeat that operation again, edit again, and hit it again. And maybe let's do one more time. And basically by doing this, we subdivided our plane multiple times anyway. So this is our plane hit Tab to exit the edit mode. And it is about time to start adding the displacement modifier jumped to the displacement tab, or actually the Modifiers tab go to Add Modifier. And from here at displays, the modifier that we will use. But what does the displacement modifier do? Well, the concept is pretty simple. We need to input right here some sort of a displacement map. But what is a displacement map? A displacement map is basically a black and white image and that tell blender how to manipulate. Let's save the geometry. So if we feed the image into Blender, here's what basically will happen. Blender will push the areas that are white up because they are white. And it will push down the areas that are black negative values down. And by doing this, blender will be able to create these different formations like that. Basically it looked like some terrains. So the displacement modifier is the modifier that will allow us to feed a displacement map to Blender. Right now the modifier doesn't have any sort of map, so we need to figure out a way on how to put the image inside of Blender. And it is pretty simple. We need a texture, just click on New, you will create a new texture. So let's e.g. call that terrain and rescore a zero-one and rescore a displacement. We created this texture. So we need right now to tell blender What does this texture look like? To do this, either you can click on this, which will take you to the Texture tab, or basically you can directly just jump right here. It is literally the same thing. Why Blender does have multiple ways to do the same thing. Hey, just done now. So let's click on this. And this is basically, as I mentioned, our Texture tab. Right now, we need to tell blender where is the texture? So if you just click on Open and inside the Resources folder, of course, you will find all the resources are used during this course here. So let's open terrain zero-one, just double-click on it and we open this map. Now, here's one weird thing, the logical thing to do, and I don't know why they don't do it this way in Blender is that basically you can directly pick the image from here. And basically it is suppose everything would work fine. I don't know why. Basically they decided to go with this approach of like you create a texture right here and then you go to the settings of that texture and I don't know why. It is just how blender works. Anyway, this is our texture. And the most important thing is that makes sure that your color space, it is linear. We're working with a black and white images. That's why we need a linear workspace or a linear color space. After doing this, Let's get back to our displacement modifier. And actually from here you will have something called coordinates, which is basically the way of how this picture or this displacement map will be mapped on the surface of this plane. The best way to do this is basically to change it to uv. Bad. If you remember, if we just go to the objects properties under UV maps, we didn't UV unwrap this model after we did all the subdivisions. So just hit Tab a to select all of your mesh. It you to do unwrap and just do unwrap and UV unwrapped our modal hit tab again to exit the edit mode. And let's get back to the modifier. And let's start playing a little bit with these settings. I'm just going to hit one to jump to the front view. And as you can see, basically this mountain or the spleen is somehow pushed down. It is supposed to be laid on the ground, the level zero. So we need to fix this issue. And that's basically what this mid-level will tell blender to do. So if it is zero, it will be computed from basically the floor level up. If it is one, it will basically be computed from your floor level down. And most of the time I always find myself with just doing zero because it just makes sense. Right now. The spleen is more or less, not more or less. It is actually really, really low poly. So we need to add more geometry to it. And to do this, That's a pretty simple. Just go to Add Modifier and just choose subdivision surface. And here's one important thing. The subdivision surface should always be before the displacement modifier. And let's crank this number to something like four. And let's do for the render, Let's do six. You might think that this is actually overkill, but believe me it is not. Most of the time when you're working with displacement maps, you will find yourself putting these huge number for the subdivision surface. It is going to be fine. Not worried anyway, right now there's displacement map is really, really, really strong. So we need to basically they'll Blender, blender, chill. We don't want you to have this crazy thing going on. And actually it's pretty simple. And so dagger displacement modifier, you will have this really nice setting which is called strength, which will basically control how strong Blender will do this displacement operation. Let's say, let's keep it at 0.2. I think it will be good. And yeah, this is basically our first terrain right now. It is just about basically doing this another time for the other terrain. So either you can go through the process of creating another plane and doing all of that. Or actually, there's another way which is basically just by selecting this terrain, hit Shift D to duplicate it twice, to move it on the y-axis, let's put it here and we need to just basically feed to this other plane a different displacement map or a different height map or correlate whatever you wanna call it from here, from my displacement modifier, I'm going to create a new texture, just like the same way you do it in the shader editor. When you click on this, you will create a new material. Same thing here. You will create a new texture. So just click on this and let's rename it to zero to jump to the settings, this texture, and from here, click on open to open a new texture into terrain, the result of three. And yeah, this is our second terrain and it is already looking pretty good. We literally all we had to do is basically to just feed to Blender two different displacement maps and we get our terrains that easy. And that's why this workflow of using height maps and displacement maps is the most efficient and more or less it will give you a really good result. Assuming of course, you do have some good displacement maps, like high-quality displacement maps. But other than that, as you can see, like literally in around 10 min, we created to like really nice looking pieces inside of Blender just by using a couple of modifiers. One thing before I leave, just make sure to rename this to terrain there too, because we will need that later and hit Enter. Perfect. Alright, so that's it for me for this video. And in the next one we're going to do some adjustments and edit camera and all of that. So at least we can start getting a feeling of how our final scene will look like. See you there? 4. Scene and Render Settings: Welcome to this new video where we will adjust a couple of settings of our scene to basically prepare blender for all the work that we will be doing. So yeah, let's just do that. So first things first, I'm just going to start by changing my render settings. And from here, I'm going to jump from EB two cycles. And of course you need to change the device from CPU GPU compute. Of course, assuming you do have a decent GPU card, or as long as you have a GPU card, you should this option because it will just give you faster previews. So just big GPU compute for the max samples in your viewport. Let's do 32 and for the max samples and your render, Let's do something like 128. That would be good for now. And let's also jump to the light paths. And let's reduce this to eight and do diffused 3.4, the glossy also, Let's do three. You might wonder like, hey, you seen what does these settings, especially the max bounces and all of that actually do? Well, here's what does this, all of this stuff do. Let's imagine you have a sun right here, and please excuse my garbage drawing in Blender. Here's how the light will behave. So let's say we will have a ray coming from here and it will hit here. Generally it will then after that it will e.g. let's say it will move to here and then maybe it will hit here, and then it will hit here. So probably it is way much more complicated. But the general concept is in reality, there is an infinity of light bounces and all the different directions. There is no way we can simulate such thing inside of Blender. So that's why we specifically can tell blender to use a specific number of balances. Which means that hey, if e.g. if we do eight, that means that a blender for your different rays, like we only want it to bounce, Let's say eight times. So let's say this is 1234, Probably it will bounce other four times. I don't know. Let's say something like this. And after this, it is done. Blender don't need to calculate any more balances. So it is kinda self-explanatory. The more balances you have, the slower your render will be. Let's just delete this whole mess that I just drew. Perfect. Let's write now jump to our different, to our output settings. As you probably know, if I hit zero, that will basically take me to the camera view. This is what my camera will see right now. We're going to adjust the settings of the camera, but not yet. I'm going to change the aspect ratio to something like 25, 60 because it is cinema scope and it is more cinematic. And I'm a sucker for that. So that's why, and for the rest of the settings, I'm going to keep them the way they are. Maybe later on I might change them, but for now, we're good to go. Let's just jump right now to the Render Settings are actually to the render passes. And from here, I'm just going to change one thing which is de-noising data. What does this option do? Well, basically Blender when rendering our image. It will also render some extra data about how to denote this image denoising data we'll do in a nutshell, here's an important thing when you check denoising data. Yes, Blender will render the denoising data, but for whatever reason, it will not use them unless you tell him basically like a blender, I want you to know that these generalizing data helped to tell blender that, hey, blender, I want you to use this de-noising data. Well, that's actually pretty simple. Just jumped to the compositing and always remember that compositing is the process that comes after rendering. So we want to denoise our Render after it is basically rendered. That's why we jumped to the compositing because that's where the after operations will happen. Just make sure to use, use nodes. And from here you will have these two sockets which are called de-noising normal and de-noising albedo. And just to understand what exactly happening if I just jump here to the render passes and I disabled the analyzing data, you will see that there will basically get hidden. And when I enable them, I will have these different sockets. And after that, if you go to add and or filter, you will actually have a node called de-noise. And I'm just going to plug it right here. Let's take the normal and plug it to the normal and take the albedo and plug it to the albedo. And you're basically done right now after we finished rendering, Blender will automatically denoise a render and actually blend or do have a really nice denoising. So that will allow us to have less sample when rendering and still get a decent result. And for now, let's just jump back to the layout and see what other settings we might change. And it seems that set for the Render Settings. And let's see, jump to our camera settings right now. For the camera, just click on this and then make sure you are in your camera settings tab. And from here, let's just change the focal length to a wider lens. Let's say something like 24 millimeter because landscapes are huge and we tend to shoot them in reality with wide focal length. So using a wine focal length will give us a more realistic result. And the other thing there is also the viewport display, which is also really nice option. And the most important one is that e.g. let's say after setting up our camera and all of that, we don't want to see all of these areas right here that the camera will and C. So basically, if you drag this plus b2, you will basically make Over areas that the camera will not see black. And this will just save a little bit of memory, first of all, when viewing your scene. And it will just make it easier to adjust, or let's say to frame our scene. And that's basically it for our camera settings. And right now the last thing I'm going to do is basically to adjust the position of our camera. And yeah, let's just do that pretty quick. I'm just going to exit the camera view. And let's say I'm just first of all, I'm just going to push this landscape bees by hitting G and then y. And let's put it close to this one. And actually, I'm going, let's say somewhere right here, or let's say right here. Let's say, Let's pick this angle and then hit Control Alt and then zero. And by doing this, you will bring the camera to the position you where basically seeing the scene from n, that is more or less actually a decent composition, I guess I might jump interview. You will have this option called camera to view. And I can just drag this to see the full main camera to view at end too high the sidebar, which will basically allow me to change the camera position in real time while navigating my 3D view port. And I guess something like this will look pretty fine for my taste. Yeah, I guess this will be good. We might add some other background mountains right here later on, but for now, we're good to go. And just to avoid moving our 3D view port and therefore moving our camera, make sure to hit N and disable this option because we don't need it anymore. So even in case e.g. you move, your camera will always stay in the right position. And one side note, just for your consideration, if you feel like your camera is actually super huge, you can jump to your camera settings from here. And you will have this option under view-port display called size, which will basically just Change the side of the gizmos of the gizmo of this camera. So e.g. it's breaking down, let's say something like 200. We'll just make the shape or less say the form of the cameras slightly smaller. It will not change anything. It is just like basically it will make the shape of the cameras smaller. So it is easier basically to navigate your 3D view port. And if you hit zero, it is basically the same exact view. The last thing that we need to do right now is that we need to add any 2D array to see our final render. So if I jumped to the rendered view, everything will basically look super dull because we don't have enough lighting in our scene, so we need to add some lighting to our scene. There are multiple ways to do this. E.g. if you uncheck Seen world, you will be able to see the rendered view, but this will not show in the final render, we need to input an actual attribute, a right to Blender. So to do this, Let's just enable this option again and jump to the shader editor. And from here we're on object mode by default, just make sure to jump to world. And basically we need to add an HDRI to our world. So just go Shift a and let's look for environment texture. And I'm writing in Arabic, Let's do environment texture, and let's plug the color to the color. Everything will be pink because we didn't open any sort of HDRI, so just open. And from here you will find in the assets something called Sunrise Perutz and rise. It is a really nice HD arise. So click on it and yeah, we will be using this HDRI to light our scene with. Also you can hit Control T to add a mapping note to it. And this will basically allow us to change the rotation of our landscape or actually of our HDRI. One small note, as you can probably see, we're seeing the HDRI in the background, so how to hide it, because we'll be adding our own skylight are on. That's actually pretty simple. If you jump to your render settings, you will find under film an option called transparent. So just click on it and boom, areas right now transparent and we will only see the effect of the HDRI. Let's adjust the lighting to something that we kind of like, well, let's say something like, Well, I guess this will be good for now. Let's keep it at 200 for now. And we might change it later if we want. But yeah, that's it for me for this video. And probably you can start to feel how the final result will probably look like, especially after the next video where we will do a little bit of shading. And basically after the next video, we will get a pretty decent results. So yeah, I will see you in the next video. Everyone also make sure to save your file 5. Shading The Terrains: Greetings everyone and welcome to this video where we will do basically a little bit of shading for our different mountains. So yeah, let's just do that. Okay. This is where we stopped last time and I'm just going to exit my camera view to have a better look at our different terrains. And yeah, it is pretty much the time to start doing some shading. I'm going to select the first terrain. And because if you remember in the last video, we jumped to the world settings to add this HDRI. Right now we're going to jump to the object mode so that we can basically change the material for our different objects. We're going to start with this terrain 01. And actually by default, Blender will already added material called surprisingly material. So let's click on this one and let's e.g. rename it to terrain underscore 01. I might also bring this slightly up to have a better view, and I'm going to hide this tool settings right here. So just click on this and uncheck Show tool settings so we will have a little bit more space. And believe me, when working in blender, you always need more space. Let's hit N too high the sidebar, and this is our principal, we SDF, after downloading the different maps from NBN CG, actually they will give you five different maps. One called the color, the details, the flow, protrusions and the soil. And I will be lying if I will say that, Hey, we will be using all of them. And actually we will only use two or actually three if you want to add some bump. But yeah, let's start one by one. We're going to start with a color. So let's just take the color and basically drag it to Blender. And let's put it right here. So this is our color and all you have to do is basically to plug it to base color. And yeah, this is already looking pretty sick, I guess. Make sure to hit Control T to add a mapping new to it just in case. And just by doing this, we're already getting a decent result, but we need to add more details to it. After that, I'm actually going to use the flow map, which is basically a map for that will tell blender which areas basically will have some sort of water. So let's take the flow map and let's drag it to Blender in the task bar. And let's do it here. And I'm going to plug the color to the specular. And as you can see, just by doing this, the water right here basically will just pop slightly even more if I just disconnect this control with the right mouse button and this is the before. And when I plug the specular, this is the after. If I just select this m, this is the before and this is the after and this is looking way better and also make sure to connect mapping note to this just in case the final map that I'm going to add is the details map, which will act as a bump map. Here's what we will do. I'm going to take the details. Let's take it to Blender and let's put it in our shader. And let's just move this here so that we can have a better view and also always activate this snapping menu so that the nodes will start to stick or to snap to the grid. This will help us to make our different nodes more organized. Let's put it here and take the vector and plug it here. And for this details map, we need to plug it to the normal. But there is a problem. If I hit Control Shift and click on this, That's how our details map will look like. It is black and white, but there is a small problem. We're going to plug this to the normal. The normal is a purple socket. So how can we convert this black and white data into a vector data which is basically a purple socket or a normal. Well, there is a really nice node called bump if I just add it right here. And as you can see, the bump will take a height which is gray socket, which means black and white data, and convert it into some normal data which is purple. So technically, if I take the color and plug it to height and take the bump and plug it to normal and Control Shift and click on the principle be SDF. We will get a result looking like this. Now, I know the result right now is really, really, really strong and we need to probably chill a little bit. So instead of doing e.g. a. Distance of one, Let's bring it to something like 0.1, which is less pronounced, let's say 0.05. And yeah, this is more or less better, I guess. Actually even we might go 0.01, so it is barely visible because this is a huge drain. So this bump node will just help us to add a little bit more details and just buys this environment a little bit more. And yeah, this is our first material for the first terrain. And right now we're going to do the same thing for the second terrain. I'm just going to jump to this bad boy right here. And let's do the exact same thing Going right now to select this material which is called terrain 01. But because I'm going to use different images, I need to create another material. So all we have to do is to just click on this new material and let's rename it to terrain a zero to right now we literally create another copy of the same material. So for this material we're going to change the different maps we do have. So for the color, just click on this and let's jump to terrain 03, which is the name of the terrain we downloaded. And let's pick color and let's jump to the flow and the terrain 03. And let's pick the flow. And for the details, let's also open the details. And yeah, we just set up our different shaders and different materials for our different terrain pieces. And if I just bring this slightly down and do zero to jump to the camera view. This is how our render is looking like right now. To be honest, I don't hate it. It is more or less decent, let's say for now, we're going to add way more details to it, but we're already starting to see how the final environment will look like. This, is it basically for how you can shade these different drain pieces. And as you can see right now, we're already starting to see the final result. It is looking pretty sick. And I guess right now you can see how easy this displacement workflow is. It is pretty simple. You just connect the nodes and everything will work because all the hard work of creating the terrain and creating the materials, it is basically already done by the guy who created these different terrain pieces. So yeah, let's add for me for this video and I will see you in the next one where we will actually add a sky and add just some scenes settings or let's say our world lighting. Yeah, See you there. 6. World Settings: Along with this course, you will actually have the sky image, which basically will be our skin in our scene. So let's see how we can add it to our scene. And surprisingly, it is also pretty simple. So yeah, let's do this pretty fast. Okay, so this is our blender file and where we stopped last time. And yeah, let's add our sky. I'm going to exit the camera view. And as you probably remember, we already activated an add-on called import images as planes. So just go to File Import and you will have here something called images as planes, just click on it. And in your Assets folder you will have this image called sky. So just click on it, and this is our sky plane. And yeah, right now, we probably need to rotate it because it should be technically oriented the same way as our camera. So here's what we will do. I'm just going to click on my camera and jump to the object properties. And it is basically rotated minus, I'm just going to hit Control C to copy this, Let's jump right now to our sky. And in the z rotation, I'm going to do Control V. So it is in the exact same way and basically just hit seven to jump to the top view. And let's move it somewhere, really, really, really far. And let's say somewhere right here, because skies are huge and they should be way, way in the background really far. Let's hit zero to see how the final result will look like. And it is pretty small, so hit S to scale it up until it cover the entire horizon. Let's hit J Z to bring it a little bit up on the z axis. And let's say something like this. This is looking pretty nice. And right now you will probably notice that this kind just look slightly weird. It should be brighter and it doesn't look right. The main reason for that is in general, sky do emit light or actually it acts like a source of light. So basically in our material settings, make sure you are on the sky. Make sure you select first of all, your sky. And in the material of the sky, you will have this image. And the most important thing, we don't need this alpha, so control right mouse button to cut it. Make sure also to take the color and plug to the emission. And by doing this, this guy will look right, and this is actually working, looking pretty sick. Also overall, if I just zoom out a little bit, as you can see this guy, I know it is super huge. Generally the upper parts of the sky should be closer to us. And how can we achieve such result? That's pretty simple. Just hit R XX twice and just rotate this slightly down like this. And if I hit zero, this is how the sky will look like. I'm seeing some clipping right here. So just hit S and scale with a little bit up and maybe do G Z to bring it slightly up. And yeah, just by doing this, basically this will make these upper areas closer to us, which is more or less the same thing that happens in real life. Hashtag realism. And also I think I might add a slightly more contrast to my image or actually to our sky. So let's add curves, RGB curves, and here's what I will do. I'm going to hit Control and take the socket and put it here and take the color and plug it to color to an S-shaped curve. So to make it way more contrast as you can see, it's, Let's try even more or something. It's just like so, yeah, that's perfect. If I just select this RGB curves and they hit empty muted. This is the before, and this is the after. This is the before and after and it is looking pretty sick, I guess. One small problem that I just noticed, which is that basically the light is technically coming from here and somehow it doesn't match that well, our source of lighting right now. So to fix this problem, Let's jump back to our world settings. And from here we can adjust the rotation of our HDRI, let's say to look, or actually it should look something like, well, surprisingly in my situation, I'm going to leave it at zero. I'm just going to hide all of these overlays to have a better view. And yeah, I'm actually more or less, I'm going to just leave it at zero. I don't know about your case, to be honest, but here's the thing, just trying to somehow eyeball it so that at least e.g. the sun is coming out of this area for a minute right now and because I hit on my overlays, so any technical way it will probably hit this areas. It will probably also hit this area to also have some areas are right here. This is more or less close to how the light will behave if this was real. So basically in your scene, try to recognize where does the light is coming from, especially from your sky and adjust your HDRI from here so that it matches more or less how the lines are actually the direction the light is coming from your sky so that everything will look believable. And right now it is about time for me to start deleting all of this month that I just draw. Now the other thing that I'm actually considering doing, which is the, basically I'm going for a more of a sunset look because I love sunsets. So I'm just going to adjust a couple of settings in my world. Make sure you aren't in world settings in your shader editor. I want to make this HDRI more sunset, if that even a word. So I want to make it a little bit more orange-ish, a little bit more red so that it gives us those warm tones of sunset. And the best way to do such thing is basically by adding a curved RGB, RGB curves. Actually, I don't know why I said it in reverse. Let's take RGB curves and let's plug it right here. And let's also hide my overlays. And here's one small thing. Technically, if I bring this up, you will expect that everything will get brighter. And why drag this down? Everything we will get darker. But actually somehow, when you are in the world settings, everything is somehow reversed. I don't know why. But here's the thing. When you are in the world settings, always remember that everything is reversed. So if you want to add more light, you do that by dragging this point down. And if you want less light to make it less contrasty, bring this up. There is weird. I know it is just how blender behaves. Anyway, let's bring this the way it was by deleting this point. And let's start adjusting a couple of settings. I'm going to do an S-shape for the general C, which is basically the general curve in the different channels. So you can do this by doing a reversed S something and just like so, so this will basically give us a little bit more of a contrast dealer, which I kinda like to be honest. And after doing this, we need to add more orange tone. This HD arrived. So how can we do that? Well, we can do that by adding some red and adding some yellow. This will technically give us orange. So let's go to the red. Don't drag it up because as I mentioned in the world, it is reversed. So drag this down to add a little bit more red, something like so we're adding some red. This is looking good and we need to add some yellow. How can we add yellow by bringing the blue down, Let's jump to B, which is stands for blue. If you bring this up, you will basically remove from blue. So let's drag this up. And actually if I just push, push it like this, as you can see, we're adding a lot of blue and different drag it down. As I mentioned, when I move it up, that's more yellow and when I bring it down that's more blue. So let's bring this slightly up. And yeah, this is more or less better at. It is more sensitive. Let's say if I just select this RGB curves and I hit M, this is the before and this is the after, this is the before and after. And it is looking pretty sick, I guess. Alright, so this is how we adjust our world lighting and how we add a sky to our scene. And I will see you in the next video. See you there? 7. Create Your Own Trees: This is where we stopped last time. And as I mentioned, we are going to create some vegetation assets, are actually not some assets actually, we are going to create some trees to do this. I'm actually going to file and create a new blender file. I have already saved this blender file, so I'm not going to save it again, but please, if you didn't save your file, make sure to do that. So don't save. And from here I'm going to hit a to select all the objects x and then delete. The most important thing is that we need to enable an add-on called sapling trees or just go to Edit Preferences. And from here you will have Add-ons. This is announced and from here, just look for Sapling AD curve, sapling tree Jan, this is the add-on we will use. I have already activated and yeah, just make sure to check this box and you're ready to go. Let's just close this bad boy and let's start working. Okay, so how to add a tree? Simply just go Shift a and under a curve you will have the sapling tree Jan, which is basically the generator responsible for regenerating our tree. Just click on it, and this is our basic tree. From here, you will have plenty of different options. The most important thing is that the first thing we are going to change is actually the load preset, which basically this add-on comes with a couple of different, let's say, presets of different trees. You can of course, experiment with them just to see how they will look like some of them actually, it somehow doesn't work for whatever reason. But yeah, let's add on is more or less old. So that's why it might not function sometimes the way you expected. But the most important thing is that basically we do have a couple of presets that we can use. Now based on my research for the highlands, we created basically the type of trees that grow in those areas are trees that are basically called spruce. And basically spruce in terms of shape, we don't have something similar to it or actually we don't have a preset for the spruce here. But actually if you change to this e.g. quaking aspen, this is more or less the look of a Spruce Street. That's why we are going to actually use this preset. You do have a couple of different options right here to change the shape of this tree. So just to show you what they do, I'm just going to hit one from the number of paths to jump to the front view. And basically the first one will be responsible for normally changing the scale of the top areas for this one. Why are they not working? Okay, That's weird. Okay. They're not working basically because you need to change this tent flame to custom shape and you will be able to change the shape of this tree. So for this one, this will basically control the size of basically, let's say, over the root. So as you can see, we're changing the size of these bad boys that are right here. This one is responsible for changing the size of the middle area, as you can see, the metal area. And the last one is basically, or actually let's jump to this one which will basically change the scale of the top areas. And for this one, it will basically move the middle. So basically if the middle is here, and let's just do this zero and do the zero. Basically, this slider is responsible to changing the position of the middle. Another might say like why this weird way of controlling this tree? I don't know. This is just how this add-on work. So for the custom shape, Let's just bring this for, Let's bring this to one and bring this to something, let's say like 0.7. And for the size of the top, let's make it one. For the size of the bottomless, make it one. Or actually let's bring this little bit down and for the middle, Let's do it like this. So this is more or less something that looked kind of decent. Let's say this is the preset. I'm going to use it as a custom shape with these different values. You can copy them if you want. After doing this, I'm going to jump from geometry to branch radius. And from here as the name states who are going to change the radius of our branches, I generally don't change this value that much. I'm only maybe going to crank it to something like 0.02. And basically this will add a little bit more thickness to the different branches and the trunk. And again, if you want, you can try playing with these different values and discover whether they exactly do. But most of the time they are just basically some simple stuff like changing the scale or somehow trying to change the shape of the tree after the branch radius, I'm going to directly jump to branch splitting. And from here, basically, right now we do have like let's say two splits. Basically what I mean by that is that we do have the main trunk and from the main trunk we're only having one split one branch. So from here, I'm actually going to increase the level 2-3. And this will add way more details to our tree, which is kind of neat. And after doing this, I'm going to leave the, all of these settings the way they are. And I'm going to jump from branch splitting two leaves, which we control the leaves as a prize. From here, the most important thing, make sure to check, Show leaves, which will basically show you all the leaves of this tree. And from here by default, Blender will use an exact funnel. If you just zoom a little bit here, as you can see, the shape of the leaves is actually exactly, which does have six sides. Let's say we don't want them. This is a horrible thing for topology. That's why we're going to change it from hexagonal to rectangular, which will make it quants and blender, love quads, Let's say we're going to change it to rectangular. And for the leaves, actually, this leaves will basically change the count of how many liters we do have for this tree, Let's say try to increase it because we can do something like 40 This will basically add more leaves to our tree. The last thing I might actually change is to change some settings right here, which are related to the size. We're actually not these, these ones. They will change the scale of these different leaves. Generally, if you Google them, the shape of the leaves of the spruce tree are a little bit, Let's say stretch and they are a little bit long. That's why we are going to increase the leaf scale in the x and the lift scale on the y. Let's write increasing it in the x. Now we want on the y actually, let's just hit the right mouse button, Reset to default value and let's try increasing on the why. And why is it acting a little bit weird? Let's try zero. Okay, That's some weird behavior from the add-on, to be honest, Let's try increasing the leaf scale on the x, maybe something like 1.5. And let's try to rotate the leaves. Okay, So from here, leaf rotate on, Let's try rotating it this way. This will make it a mess. So let's just make this one and just increase the life scale for the leaf scale from here to something like 0.2. We're going to increase it on all the different axes, but this is not a big deal. Okay? What about right now we'll change the scale on the x. We can do this. This is such a weird behavior. Let's try increasing this to 0.3 and bring the leaf scale on the x to something like 0.4. Let's try 0.6. And yeah, I guess this is looking pretty neat and more or less similar to the shape of a spruce. After doing this, make sure that you lock your settings for basically what we will do next. Then, basically right now you can click out. Nothing happened. You can collect out. Why? Okay, maybe I need to select this tree. Now it is gone. And this is basically how you can generate a tree using the supplementary Jan. And in the next video, we are going to shade this tree to basically make it look realistic, and then we will import it to our project. Some of you might be wondering why I didn't create more than one variation of this tree. Well, you can definitely do that and you can spend some time using the sapling tree Jen to create different versions. But my main issue with this approach is that basically whenever I'm going to create a new tree, for whatever reason, Blender will just forget the values that I have inputted. So I need to basically do the whole work again to create a different tree. And yeah, you can definitely go through that route by creating different trees. This will definitely give you more variation. In our case, there are two things I just want to mention. We are going to render this tree multiple times out of this blender file in, let's say, different angles. And this will more or less gives us the look of a different tree. So it is not a big deal. And the other thing, these trees will be actually really small compared to the size of our scene. And there is no way, let's say for someone to spot that, hey, there's render is using the same trees over and over again. So that's why I guess it is okay, and we can work with just one tree. So make sure to save your file. And I will see you in the next video where we will shade this tree. See you there? 8. Shading The Trees: Hello and welcome. In this new video where we will basically shade our tree and make it basically look realistic. Alright, let's just do that. Okay, So this is our blender file and where we stopped last time unless start shading. The first thing I'm going to do is basically to jump to the rendered view and from here make sure to enable to actually are actually disabled seen world. And let's choose one of these HDRI that blender comes with to use it basically to lighten our scene with, and also probably I need in the render settings to change it from EV two cycles. Let's do GPU compute. And for the max samples, let's do 32. And for the max samples, let's do 128 when it comes to the render for the light paths, Let's make this eight. Let's do both of these three. And yeah, that's basically it for now. We're good to go. We're probably going back to these settings later on when we start rendering this tree. But for now, we're good to go. Now, here's an important thing about the tree add-on that we used when we've created this tree, it is not actually an actual mesh. It is actually a curve. And how can you verify that if I just select e.g. the trunk and I hit tab, as you can see, this is not a usual mesh. It is actually a curve. We don't want to use actually this curve. We want to use an actual mesh so that we can UV unwrap it easily. So to do this, all we have to do is basically e.g. let's start with the trunk, make sure you select it. And then if you go to object, you will have convert. And from here you will have mesh. And if you click on it, and then I hit tab, yep, we turn this whole thing that used to be a curve, we turned it into an actual mesh. And same thing for the leaves. Let's just select the leaves depth and jump to the edit view. As you can see, Aro, oh, actually they are an actual mesh so we don't have to transform them. They're not a curve anyways, so just hit Tab to exit the edit mode and we're good to go and basically to start shading. So let's bring this a little bit up and let's just zoom in our trunk so that we can see it. And from here, I'm going to change it to the shader editor. And let's pick the default material that already comes with a new blender file and select it and let's e.g. call it trunk, or actually we can also call it bark. So click on your principle be SDF, Control Shift T. And from here, just navigate to your assets folder. You will have this folder called barks. Click on it and basically just pick one of these. These are extra ones in case you want to use them for your different projects. But for now, I'm going to use the bark 01, select the albedo, hit Control and select the displacement, normal and roughness, and click on principle texture setup and boom. Nothing will happen for whatever reason, I don't know why. Let's see why are we apply the material on the wrong object? We applied it on the leaves. So just click on this to remove it from the leaves. And let's make sure to select your bark. And from here, select bark and boom, we're good to go. Let's just zoom in a little bit. And as you can see, our texture is weirdly mapped on on the bark or on the trunk. I don't know actually, what is the correct word? Let's just call it bark. Anyway. Why is there? Because we need to UV unwrap our model. How can we UV unwrap our model basically by hitting tab, hit a to select your entire object, hit you. And in our case, we're going to use q projection, click on Queue projection and hit tab again to exit the texture. Right now, it is so, so huge, that's why it is pixelated. That's why let's move here and bring the scale to something like five. And as you can see, it is perfectly mapped right now on our bark. This is actually looking pretty good, I guess, anyway. So this is our bark material. The only thing I'm going to do because I just want to delete all of these because I'm obsessed over not having these different labels in this way. I hate seeing my nodes in this way. So just hit Control X to delete it and also had this and basically X to delete this label. I don't know why. I just find it for the simple material, it is way easier to just basically use this view instead of the weird labeled the Node Wrangler add-on create. The last thing we are going to do is basically to create the material for the leaves. And let's just do that. And this is probably going to be the trickiest thing, not that it is hard. It is just annoyingly weird and you will understand what I mean. Okay, so let's select the trees are actually the leaves, and let's create a new material and let's call it leaves perfect. From here I'm going to hit Control Shift D, and let's move to the leaves folder. And from here you will have different leaves. Probably let's open leave 01. This doesn't look like the leaves of a spruce. Leave zero to this one. This one do actually look like the leaves that you will find on a spruce tree. So what are the maps that we will need? We need the albedo, or actually it is the same thing as the color, displacement, normal and roughness principle, texture setup. And let's delete all of these rerouting nodes because I hate them. This will look weird. Why is that? Because first of all, we didn't UV unwrap our model and we need to do that. And we are going to do that in a second. So just select Lives had tab hit three to jump to the face mode. Or actually you can do it from here. And because all of these leaves are technically identical, we only need to UV unwrap or only one of them. And basically we can use it for all the different leaves. Let's select e.g. this one hit you and select unwrap and hit tab again to exit. And right now, there is a small problem that I need to explain. Basically, if I just open this image, which is the leaves albedo, one thing that you will notice is that basically, first of all, yes, it does look weird and also it does have the colors we need. But the issue we're talking about is that basically there are some areas that should be transparent. E.g. these areas that are right here should be transparent because we want actually to see through the leaves and all of that. So we need to figure out a way to tell blender that table lender, the only thing that should be visible is only basically the actual leaves, all of these stuff right here that is blurred. We don't want to see it. So we basically need some sort of a mask. And how can we do that? Well, this is actually pretty simple. In the resources folder. With this texture, you will actually have this preview. And basically as you can see, it is a transparent image. And we can use the transparency out of this image to mask our different leaves. And you will understand in a second what I mean. Let's just get back to Blender. And from here, let's just move both of these here. Hit this one and hit Control Shift D to duplicate it while keeping this link and click on this or no, not that one. This, to open a new image from here, select your leaves preview, which has basically make sure it is this one, the one with the transparent background and hit Open Image. And from here make sure to change the color space from sRGB to non-color data. And basically just take the alpha, which will tell blender with this transparent and what is not, and plug it into alpha. And boom, right now, this whole thing is looking like legit leaves. There is only one small problem. We need to fix their position. As you can see, e.g. right here, it is looking slightly weird. It is like somehow growing from thin air. And this is actually a really weird. So let's just fix this issue by jumping to the UV Editing tab. And from here, hit a to select all of your different leaves and hit a to basically you can scale them from here. Here's what we will do. We are going to change this to the rendered view so that we can see everything and make sure also to disable seen world for whatever reason, Blender doesn't use the same lighting that you use in the layout view. Or actually when you change the view, you need to enable this option again, is just weird, but it can be useful, I guess, anyway. So let's e.g. Zoom and one of these leaves just so that maybe we can fix this issue. So basically the issue is simple. If we do a to select all of these different leaves, we can basically just scale them a little bit down and hit R to rotate them. And let's just use only this one. Let's see how they will look like. Okay, there are definitely some areas where we're still having this weird problem of growing out of thin air that some areas are okay and some areas are still suffering from the same problem. Anyways, I guess I'm not going to bother more to basically try to fix this or try to make it perfect because we're going to use some cheating, let's say, because this tree will be really far and we will not actually be able to see all of these details and that actually there are some leaves growing out of thin air. And actually if right now I jumped to a layout from here and I hit one to jump to the front view. This is our tree and it is looking good. I guess the rise is no way actually, I guess to be able to see that problem, even though the trees in the other scene will be actually way smaller than this. So this is basically the tree that we will populate our hills with. And in the next video, I'm actually going to show you how you need to render this tree to use it later on in the other file without increasing your render time. So yeah, see you in the next video. Everyone also makes sure to save your file 9. Prepare The Trees For Rendering: Hello and welcome in this new video where we will basically render these trees. So as you probably remember from the last video, I already mentioned that basically we will not use 3D trees because they will be super heavy. And I wanted to show you a different technique by using three planes. In the last video, we created this tree, which is a 3D model of our tree. We created it actually in Blender. So right now I'm going to show you how you can do typically render it. What we're trying to do is basically to export an image like the one you're seeing right now. And then we will use it to populate our scene with what allows this technique to work is basically that these trees will be really small. So it will be really, really, really hard to tell whether they are actually 3D models or they are just simple 2D trees. And the really nice thing about this workflow is that it will save a lot of memory and you can literally create millions and millions of trees without actually putting a lot of heavy load on your computer. Now, it is not as easy as you just e.g. at a camera and then you render an image of this tree. It doesn't work like that exactly. We need to export some more data, or let's say we need to extract some more data from this blender scene in order to get the best result possible. So here's what we will do. First things first, I'm actually going to go to Shift a and I'm going to look for a camera. And let's jump to the settings of this camera from here. And here's the most important thing and the type it is basically right, no perspective, which means that if I hit zero to jump to the number pad, or actually to jump to the camera view. My camera right now is a little bit off, so let's hit and to open the sidebar, Let's go to View and camera to view so that basically my camera is stuck right now to this 3D view port. Here's what I mean by perspective camera. This is a perspective camera. Basically we can see the distortion that happens because of the perspective of the camera. I'm going to uncheck this option and I'm going to get back from perspective to orthographic. And as you can see when you choose orthographic, it is basically like you eliminate the third dimension, which is the depth of the image. You eliminate it. You might ask, why is that? Well, because we want just a flat image of that tree. So yeah, that's why we're going to change the type from perspective, the orthographic. Now, here's just one important thing. 95% of the times when you're working in blender, you will only use perspective. So don't like really stress about what orthographic means. Anyway, let's choose orthographic. And from the orthographic scale, you can basically change something like the focal length of the camera. But in my case, I'm actually going to leave it at six and I'm going to move the camera. Let's exit the camera view and let's try to look for where is the camera? Yeah, it is somewhere right here. Yeah, This is our camera. Let's make sure we're selecting it and let's jump to the properties location. Here's what we will do in the location on the Z. Make sure to put it at zero for now in the rotation on the y, make sure it is also zero. And for the rotation on the z also make sure it is zero and the rotation on the x, Let's make sure it is 90. The main reason we're doing that is that we want this camera to be basically straight on like looking like this. We don't want any sort of rotation like this or like this. That's what we're doing. And as you can see for the location, it is not on the y-axis, so makes sure the location on the why it is also zero. Oh no, I did something wrong. Actually make sure that let me get back to this to 10 m or actually -10 m. And the location on the y are actually on the x. On the x should be zero on the x location x. Let's put it zero. So right now it is perfectly looking at this tree, let's say zero to jump back to the camera view. And that's what our camera is seeing right now. And I don't want to actually render an image that does have the aspect ratio of a full HD video, I want to export it as a square image. That's why I'm going to jump to the Output Settings. And from here I'm going to choose something like 1024, which will give me a square canvas to render. Now, it is just a matter of basically changing the location of the camera so that the entire tree will be visible. And I will show you a couple of things that you probably need to keep in mind. Let's jump back to the camera. Let's jump back to the object properties and let's change the location on the Y, way, way down, okay, Nothing will change. Never mind, we need to change all of those settings from the camera orthographic, orthographic scale. Let's push it way, way up so that we almost can see the entire tree lesson, let's say something like 20. And the most important thing right now we need to change the location of this camera so that this tree, or let's say the bottom of this tree will be around here. So the best way to do this is basically make sure you're selecting your camera and hit G to move the camera at x0 to only move it on the z-axis. And let's move it just like so. Basically just make sure that the bottom, the trunk of the tree is like basically in the bottom of the frame. And yeah, that's the image we're having right now. Basically we're having a flat image of a 2D tree, which is exactly what we want. And this is the main thing that we will use to render this tree. There are a couple of things that we probably need to keep in mind for now before we actually dive into rendering, which is that let's prepare this tree as best as we can to implement it in the scene. Let's do a little bit of optimizing this tree. Let's say I'm going to hit Enter to close the sidebar, and I'm going to open another 3d view port right here. And also if you hit the Home key, you will be able to frame this tree in the second preview. Let's hit D to close this, let's close the header. Let's close the show tool settings. And let's also hide all the overlays. So we only can see this beautiful tree right here. And maybe in the camera settings, Let's jump to viewport display the best part two, Let's bring it up to one. And yeah, this is our tree. First of all, I want to add a plane and you will know why. So go shift a mesh plane and maybe let's make the scale something like 10 m, or let's actually make it 100 m so that it is huge for this one, basically I'm going to give it immaterial. Let's not even a material. I'm just gonna give it a color that is pretty similar to the color of the scene that we will use. Basically a dark greenish color. From here, I'm going to pick a new material, I'm going to call it e.g. ground. And from here, just make it the dark green that we do have in our previous scene, which is something like So I guess, yeah, let's make it like this. Maybe let's push it even in like this. Now you might be wondering, you're seeing why are you doing this? If we tried to match as much as possible, how this tree will look like if it were actually in that scene, that will make the whole result basically better. And that's what I'm trying to do. And the other thing, which is the color of the lighting, if you remember, in the object world, basically are we still did an input any HD arise. So basically we're using the built-in HDRI to light in the scene. So yeah, it is time to add an HDRI. So let's go shift a search and let's look for environment texture. Let's put it here, and let's plug this to here. Click on Open, and in the assets folder you will find the sunrise XR. Let's click on it. And from here make sure also to jump from Scene Lights. Let's check scene world so that we're basically using our HDRI to light in our scene with nothing changed because we are using basically the same HDRI that is built-in in Blender. I'm seeing this rise to the render settings. And from here makes sure that you check an option called The remember it is called film transparent, where it is, alright? And their film, you will have transparent. So basically the HDRI will be transparent and we will have a transparent render. Let's get back to our normal view and let's hide the stools. Sorry for being too nice, neat, picky about the UI of Blender. Anyway, one thing that you might actually want to do is basically if you go and add a curves node RGB curves in the world shader, we can bump a little bit the oranges, which we can do basically by lowering the blues, if we lower the blues, and as you probably remember when we are in the world shading, everything is reversed. So let's bring the blew up and bring the greens up, which should give us a more orangey look for the street. Let's make it more subtle. Yeah, I think this is better, this is more sensitive and it will look better with this lighting in our other scene. And also one thing I just noticed here, there is a small gap which might cause some problems later on. So let's do g, z, Let's move it a little bit. Just like so make sure it is clipping in the bottom. That's how it is looking right now, perfective, and this is our 2D tree plane. And right now I'm going to show you how you can render this whole thing. 10. Rendering The Trees: Hello and welcome. In this video where I'm going to show you how you can render these trees. One of the important things that we need to do right now is basically to tell blender to denoise our render from the render passes. Make sure to check de-noising data whereas denoising data. Yeah, make sure to check this option so that when rendering Blender will render some extra data on how we can denoise our render. But for whatever reason, as I always say, Blender will not use these inflammations unless you tell it, actually use it. So let's jump to the compositing. Compositing is the stuff that happens after rendering. And I'm going to check Use nodes. And from here I'm going to move this here. And let's go to Add Filter. And you will have d noise. Let's put the noise here. And it is as easy as plugging noisy image to or actually not noisy image, just plug the denoising normal to the normal and the denoising albedo, albedo. And let's get back to our usual seen in the layout. Alright, now our render will be denoised and it will look super crisp and clean after rendering. So right now we're ready to render. We're going to render a simple image like the one you're seeing right now, which is just a PNG or a picture with the transparency of this tree. It is basically the same picture you're seeing right here. And also we're going to render an image looking like this, which is basically if you are into 3D, then you will probably know that this is a normal map for people who don't know. A normal map is basically just an extra map that will allow us to squeeze more details from our 2D tree so that we will try, at least to fake that it looks actually 3D, even though it is just a 2D tree. And the last thing we're going to render, which we will actually only need to render one time the World normal. And basically we will use it to tell blender What is up and what is down. Because sometimes blender don't know the different orientations. And fortunately, so let's do this. This is gonna be fun. Right now. We do have our 2D tree image, which is basically we're seeing right here. So all you have to do is to go to Render and render image. This is really hard, I know. And all you have to do is basically to wait for blender to render this to the tree. And I'm going to show you what you need to do next. Our image just finished rendering, and this is our 2D tree right now, all we have to do is to go to Image, Save As, and in the resources folder, you will find two different folders. One of them is called the acinus three planes and the other one is called Course three planes. These are the ones I used for my past scene basically when I was preparing for the course and in the course three planes, these are basically the trees we're creating right now. I would highly recommend that you go with these three planes that we're creating right now because I think they look slightly better in terms of lighting. Let's jump to the course three planes. And here's what we're going to call it. We're going to call this render tree underscore 01 because this is the first tree, another underscore, let's call it color. So basically this is the color tree number one from here, I'm going to keep these settings the way they are. You don't need to change them. The most important thing is that make sure you are in PNG and you check RGBA so that you will render also the alpha channel. In other words, you will also render the transparency with the image so that we can later use it. These are the things that you need to keep in mind. And all you have to do is basically to click on save as image. This is our first colored tree. Right now, we need to render a normal map for this. This is going to be super simple. Jumped to this basically one right here, viewport shading leg on this small arrow and change to mat cap. There are the mat cap. You will have this option right here, which is basically for normal. And as you can see right now, this tree-like, looks like a normal map. That's pretty cool, right? Anyway, here's what we're gonna do. I'm just going to bring this like this. And Andrew view, you will have an option called viewport render image. This one, viewport render image, which if we click on it, it will basically take a screenshot of what we see right now in the 3D view port. So if I click on it, boom, this is our tree number one. This is the normal map that belongs to it. So from here, all we have to do is basically to go to Image Save As and 301. Yes, and I'm going to change this to normal, perfect tone and just click on Save Image. Now, this is our first story and it is basically a ready for the next step, which is basically shading it. But before we jump into shading those two, the three planes, Let's render a couple of more trees so that we can give more variations. And this is actually pretty simple. We're just going to repeat this process, let's say three or four times. Here's what we're gonna do. Basically, I'm just going to select this tree with the trunk also and hit our Z to basically rotate it on the z-axis. And let's rotate it to something like this, which will give us a different looking tree because the tree does have different shapes when you rotate it. So instead of creating multiple trees, we can rotate this tree, which will give us a slightly different tree. I know this is really dumb, but it works. Let's go to Render and render image. This is our second tree, let it render. And now after we render this image, let's go to Image Save. As, you know, we don't want it to be 31. Let's call it 302. And this is color not normal. Let's call it color, Save As image. Let's close this. And from here let's go to view, Viewport, Render Image, Image Save As actually, here's a really nice trick. Let's select 301 normal. So both of these right now we'll have the same name. But if you click on this small plus right here, the 01 will become zero. To look at this, boom, it is alright, no 02. So this is way easier than actually changing the name and just hit Save As image. This is our second tree. Boom, that was easy. Let's rotate it even more. Let's do our z, rotate it a little bit more. Let's say something like So render, render image. Let's wait for it to render and boom, it just finished rendering. Let's go to Image Save As, instead of changing the name, Let's pick 30 to color, and let's click on plus. So this is 303 color PNG, That's perfect. Save as image. Let's close this view, viewport render image. This is our tree number three. So go Image, Save As, let's select the zero to normal. Zero to normal. We need to make it 03. Click on this plus button 303 normal, That's perfect. Let's hit Save As image. Right now we do have three trees. Let's add another one just for fun. Let's rotate this tree even more. Make sure to select both of them are z and let's rotate it, something like so. Let's go to render, render image. Let's wait for it to render. Alright, it finished rendering. Let's go to Image Save As and from here, let's choose 03 color. Let's make it zero for Save As image. Let's close this. Go to View, viewport render image. And let's save this under Image, Save as 03 normal. Let's make it zero for normal Save As image. And boom, we just rendered for different variations of this tree. I think that was easy, It wasn't hard. I guess the last thing I'm going to do is basically to add a cube. I know this is anticlimactic, the default cube in Blender. While we're finishing our work, Let's go shift a mesh cube. I'm going to hit G, z one. So basically I move this cube 1 m above, and yeah, let's scale it. Let's hit S and let's scale it way, way up until it almost filled the entire frame right here, not worry about it clipping the tree. That's not a big deal, had GZ and let's move it up. I want it to basically fill the frame barely for fill the frame, something like cell. And I'm going to hide this tree. Let's also hide this plane. Oh, not the plane. I need to also hide it. Okay, it's inside of that. I only want to render this basically solid plane because that's what will tell blender, What is up and down and all of that basically the direction of the normal. You don't need to stress a lot about that. I'm only going to render this one time. So all you have to do after you made sure that the cube fills the entire camera preview, just go to View, View, viewport, render image. And yet it is just solid color, but it will be really helpful. I don't really have to do is to go to Image, Save As just like before. And let's call this world normal. What a creative name, save as image. And let's close this and hit Control S to save this Blender project. And we just finished rendering our 2D trees. I think that was easy, at least I hope so. In the next video, I'm going to show you how you can basically shave those. Do the trees. See you in the next video. Bye everyone. 11. Shading 2D Tree Planes: Hello and welcome. In this new video where we will basically create the 2D trees. This is where we stopped last time. And actually to do all the work that we will do during this video, I'm going to create a new blender seen. So first of all, make sure to hit Control S just in case to save our scene and we don't want to lose our work and then go to File New and general. And this is a fresh blender seen, what does the first thing that you should do when you start a new blender seen, well, delete everything Hicks and then delete because are only used for this new blender seen is basically to just create the trees and shade them. Uh, later on we will pour them into our main scene, let say. So if you remember in the first or the second video, we actually activated a couple of add-ons in Blender. One of those add-ons was important Images as Planes, and that's the main add-on we will use to import our trees. So here's what we're gonna do. Go to file, import, Import Images as Planes. In the resources folder you will have two different folders. One of them is called the acinus three planes, and the other one is called Course three planes. Basically the symmetry planes contains the trees that I first used when I was creating the scene for the first time. And the course three planes, these are basically the ones that we created during the last couple of videos. We're going to use these ones because I think they look slightly better. So let's double-click. And from here, you will have all the trees that were rendered during the last video. The most important thing is that we're only going to import only one image, and later on we will create different materials for it. So double-click on e.g. 301 color and this is our tree. We're not seeing anything because we're not in the rendered view. So let's jump to the rendered view and let's change also a couple of render settings from here. First thing, render engine, let's change it to cycles device GPU. Compute for this, let's make it 32 and disable noise threshold, disabled noise threshold and make this 128. Actually changing their understanding is unnecessary because we're not gonna do any sort of rendering from this file. The last thing I'm going to do is basically to add one of the H2 arise that comes with Blender and use it to as a light for our scene from here, make sure to choose this sunrise one because that's the same HDRI we used in our main scene. Just click on it and boom, this is our tree and it is looking super good. Now, there are a couple of things that we need to do. First of all, as you can see, the tree is on the ground so we need to rotate it. So just select it, hit R to rotate it, x to rotate it only on the x-axis and type 90 to rotate it on the x-axis 90 degrees and then hit Enter and boom, This is our tree. Now, here's an important thing. As you can see, the origin of this plane is actually somewhere in the middle of the tree and that's bad. And here's why Blender, when it will distribute these trees on a plane, it will put the origin on the, basically on the level of the emitting surface, which mean hypothetically, let's say we have plainly that looks like this. This is the ground when we will ask a blender to distribute these trees on basically on the ground. We want to basically to be something like this. We want on a home. We want it to be like this because this is the ground. We want the tree to be like right here, but that's not what will happen. Blender will put the origin on the ground. So what will happen is that it will basically put it just like so, so we need to move this origin point right here so that later on when Blender will distribute those trees, they will look basically normal. It will distribute them from the origin, which is the bottom of the trunk. So how can we do this? Well, it is going to be pretty simple. Hit one from the number pad to jump to the front view and actually lend me delete all of these lines that I drew and then hit Tab to jump to the edit mode. And the really nice thing when you're in the edit mode, when you move your plane, origin point will basically stay in place. Meanwhile, if I just jump back for a quick second to the object mode, when I move the object, the origin point will move with it. But in the Edit tab, I can move them separately. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to hit J, z and move it a little bit up and just make sure basically to make this point somewhere in the bottom of the trunk, this is not the most precise way to do this, but it is more than enough. And yeah, this basically is our tree right now. And we made sure that the origin is in the bottom of the trunk head tab to exit the edit mode, now we need to do a little bit of shading and also, it is also pretty simple. From here, I'm going to jump to the shader editor, okay? And as you can see, blender already connected all the different nodes we need. Because one of the benefits of important images as planes is that it will create the material for us. If you remember, we actually rendered a normal map which we need to use. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to go Shift a and I'm going to look for image texture. I'm going to put it right here, click on Open and from here, basically because we imported the trees are one color, I'm going to also import re zero-one normal, double-click on it. And from these settings, make sure to change the color space from sRGB tonight in color because the normal map is not colored data, it is basically hide data. And after doing this, we need to connect this normal map with a normal socket, but this is a yellow one and this is a purple one. So we need to convert this yellow data, which is a covered data into a normal data. How can we do this by adding a normal map? Note, this is really easy, and basically I will connect the color to the color because they're both yellow and they connect the normal to the normal. And this, as you can see, will give us some more details in our tree. Now some stuff you might say, like Hey, seen, but it is looking somehow weird Actually that's not a problem related to the normal. It is actually a problem related to the roughness. So make sure to bring your roughness up to one. And boom, this is now looking way, way, way better. We are going right now to basically use the word normal, which tell blender what's up and what's down. So make sure to select your trees or when normal hit Shift D to duplicate this node. And from here, click on Open and open the World normal and also make sure that the color space is set to none color. We're going to mix this one with this one. You can definitely add a combined color node and all of that. But here's another handy shortcut that you might want to use, hit Control Shift. And by clicking on the rightmost button, you can drag over two nodes that you want to connect. And when I release, Boom, I combined both of them. Isn't that sick. But from here I'm going to change the type from x to overlay, and I'm going to drag this number up to one and boom, this is my tree right now. And as you can see, when I rotate around it, it is giving me somehow a 3D look, which is absolutely sick. I guess. Another thing that you might actually want to do, either you can bring this number up to something like ten, which will make the effect way, way more strong or make it more subtle like e.g. 0.5, which will give you a result more similar to actually like you're not using a normal map in my case, I guess I'm just going to leave it at one because I think it looks good. Yeah, that's basically it for how we can texture these tree. Now, of course, you can go crazier with this shading setup and all of that and add some translucency. But to be honest, for the sake of keeping everything simple and grounded, I'm not going to dive deeper into nodes and all of that. The only thing I wanted to say is that it is not hard to do all of the stuff. It will just take a little bit more time basically to find the specific values to get a better looking tree. But for our purposes, this will be more than enough. The only thing we need to do right now is basically to do the same process for all the different trees. And this is actually not that hard. So here's what we're gonna do. I'm going to rename this tree 012, something like trees or one, remove the word color. And from here, I'm also going to remove the word color. So basically we do have a plane called 301 with a material called 301, I'm going to hit Shift D to duplicate it and hit the right mouse button to cancel any movement. And I'm going to rename this decrees or two. And I'm going to create a copy of this material by clicking on this small button right here, click on it. And right now we created a new material which I'm going to call it 02. We created an actual copy of the material of the tree 01. This will have a material called trees are one and this is Teresa or two, right now, both of them are identical. So we need to go to make sure you're selecting the tree 02 and the material 302, we're going to change the image right here, which drives the color Looking of the tree because it is a copy of the previous material, as you can see right now, it is called 301 color. We're going to change this to 30 to color. And also in the normal map, make sure it is 302 normal for the world Normal, keep it the same. So if I just hit J x, this is our secondary. Boom, that was easy. Right now, I'm going to hit Shift D again, and let's move it on the x-axis. And I'm going to rename this to trees or three. And also I'm going to create another copy of this material and let's call it 303. And the same thing, we need to change the image of the color 0-203. And from here make sure also you change the normal two trees or three normal. This is tree number three and Shift D on other time. And let's rename this to 304, boom. And also we need to create a copy of this material. Click on it and let's change the name to 304 and we need to replace these images. Click on this and let's import 304, which is this one. And also true 03 normal, it needs to be treated for normal. And boom, now we do have four variations of different trees. And as you can see when I rotate around them, it is almost there looking 3D. Yes, they are to the three images that they will give us the illusion. Like they are actually 3D trees because they will be really small. And now we're seeing the only thing that we need to do right now is basically to select all of these trees and hit Alt J to basically resist their position. So right now all of them are in the middle while yes, in are you doing this? Because when scattering stuff on a surface, blender needs all the different elements to actually be on the center of the scene for whatever reason. So that's why we're putting them in the center of the scene. And the other thing, I'm going to change the name of this collection from collection, which is a pretty creative name. I'm going to change them to a more creative name, which is trees. So later on we will be actually, I wrote three, E's, actually two. Alright, so let's run when I will import this collection from this blender file, I will know that I need to import the collection named trees. The last thing you need to do is basically to go to File, Save As, and I'm going to save it as two d, three planes and boom, just click Save As, and yeah, these are our two dash three planes. In the next video, we're going to import them to our scene and scatter them on our mountain. Finally, our journey in creating trees is over. But yeah, I think it will save us a lot of rendering time. I will see you in the next video where we will actually scatter those different tree planes. This will be really nice and we will use some geometry nodes for that. I promise you it will be easy. Hello, We'll see you in the next video. 12. Scattering 2D Trees: Hello and welcome. In this new video where we will basically scatter these different three planes on our Main Landscape. Okay, so this is where we stopped last time basically by creating these 2D tree planes. And as you probably remember at the beginning of this course, we created the terrain and we created its material and all of that. So right now we're going back to that blender file. First of all, make sure that you've saved your file that belongs to the 2D tree planes that I'm going to go to File Open in the resources folder, I will have high land zero for this is basically the last step we did when we were creating our terrain. So if you're going to use my files, you can open Highlander zero for or in case you saved your own work previously, just make sure to open that blender file. In my case, it is called hyaline zero for Double-click on it. Let's wait for a second for it to open. And boom, this is our blender file as we left it the last time, I'm just going to jump to the render view to see how the whole thing is looking. And boom, this is our environment from the last video are actually from when we were creating it. So the question right now, how can we scatter those different three planes on our landscape? This is gonna be actually super simple. The only annoying thing is that we need to tell blender basically where to put these trees. So here's what we will do. I'm just going to jump back to the normal view and I'm just going to do this to exit the camera view. And these are our different drain pieces. And actually I'm going to show all the overlays to make our life easier. And let's start basically with this one. This is the main terrain piece that is in the foreground. I'm going to hit the Tilde key to basically isolate it so that I only see it. And let's see how we can scatter our three planes. First of all, in order to scatter is those three planes, we need to import them. So go to File append, and from the list append you will have here something called, let's just jumped to that list view. Do the three planes. This is the blender file we create that contains the two, the three planes. So double-click on it. And from here you will have different folders of all the different elements that exist within that folder. As you probably remember, we actually created a collection called tree. So inside collection you will have this collection called tree. So technically when we will basically on it and hit Append, Blender will import the collection called tree with all the objects that are inside it, which are basically the trees. So make sure to click on trees and then append and boom, this is the collection that does have the trees. And just to be sure, if I just jumped to the rendered view, as you can see, our trees right now are here with the material and all of that. The really nice thing about this workflow is that you can create different blender file for different assets that you will use that in the future, all you have to do is basically to append them, just like the way you saw right now. I'm just going to disable this collection for now. And actually I'm going to create a new collection, or boy, it created it inside this tree. So let's hit Control Z and let's create a new collection and let's call it e.g. assets, basically the assets we will use. And I'm going to select this entire collection and I'm going to move it inside of assets and boom. So right now I have a separate collection for all the assets files in case they want to disable it, all they have to do is basically to just click on this. Right now, start scattering those trees. How can we do that? Well, there are multiple techniques to do this. The old way in blender was basically by creating a particle system and all of that, which honestly, I absolutely hate because it does have a lot of settings and it takes time to get a good result. That's why we're going to use geometry notes. And I know a lot of people are scared of Geometry notes. I always say that, but actually once you understand the concepts behind it, it is actually super friendly and way easier to work with. And let's say more logical because you're the one building the systems and you know exactly what you want. In this video, we'll learn how to distribute elements using geometric notes. And believe me, it is gonna be super simple. Here's what we will do while I'm selecting these three planes. I'm going to jump to from the shader editor to the geometric node editor. Yeah, this one right here. So click on it and we're going to click on New to create a new geometric node tree. And by the way, if I jumped to the modifiers, you will see that I have added also a geometric node modifier. Before I start doing all of that, I'm just going to disable the subdivision surface from the viewport by clicking on this just so that we make everything faster for now. Later on, we'll basically get it back or actually, you know what, let's get it back here and maybe let's lower the 3D view port to something like two. Your computer will not struggle in rendering what we will do right now, Let's call this geometric new tree, e.g. let's call it tree scatter underscore, or let's call it Every for the foreground, because you will create different geometric no trees for the foreground and the background elements. You will understand what I'm, what I mean in a second. So basically this is our geometry node right now. It does have a group input and output. This is the original geometry, the group input, and basically it is getting outputted here will do different operations. So how can we scattered elements on a surface? Here's how it works. First of all, I'm going to add a node called Distribute points on faces. And as the name says, we are going to distribute points on a face, which mean that just so that you can see what it does it do if I take the geometry and plug it to mesh. This is our original geometry by the way. And they take this and plug it to geometry or no, as you can see, basically blender distributed different points on the surface that we created. I can increase the density of them, e.g. and I can change this C2 have multiple variations The most important thing is that right now we distributed points on faces. And the thing is, all we need to tell blender right now is that hey, blender, just replace these points wherever the stuff that we want you to replace web. So in this case, we want to tell blender that, hey blender, we want you to replace the points with the trees. So all you have to do is basically to drag this collection called tree is right here. Boom. And we will add another node called instance on points. So go Shift a and let's look for instance on points where he's instance on points. Yeah, I'm going to put it right here. Basically this node will take the points that we created using the distribute points on faces, and it will put the instances on them. I'll say this again. The instance on Boeing snowed. We'll put the instances of the points. What are the instances? In this case, it is basically the collection called trees that does have the tree. So if I take geometry and plug it to instances, look what will happen. Boom, I will have plenty of different planes right now. As you can see, they're just sold planes because I'm not in the rendered view. But if I jumped to the rendered view, as you can see, we're having a lot of trees. Now. Probably there is some black areas. That's because there is a transparency problem because the light is trying to penetrate through multiple transparent layers. That's why it is getting black, but we will fix that later easily. But yeah, this is the most simple version of how to distribute certain elements on a certain surface. But we're going to spice it up a little bit to make it basically look way, way better. First things first, I want also to see the dream that we created. As you can see right now, the data flowing through here is basically our original terrain. We transformed it into points and then we put the instances. So basically lost our original terrain even though we want it to be back. So how can we do this? Well, this is actually super simple. I'm going to add another node called joint geometry. And I'm going to put it right here. And as the name states, it will combine different geometries. I want to combine these trees with the original terrain. And where can I get the original terrain actually from this? Because as you probably remember, the thing that is going out of this node is actually our original geometry that we created, the original terrain. So technically, if I just take geometry and plug it to the joint geometry node, boom, I will have the terrain right here. As you can see, it is really tiny. The reason for that is that actually the drain is really small, but actually the trees are really huge. So we need to change the scale. We can either e.g. change the scale, e.g. let's say to something like 0.2 and boom, they're still so huge. Let's try 0.1. Okay, this is slightly better, but right now all the trees will have the exact same scale. So to add more variations to the scale of these trees, we can add another node which is called the random, random value. I was going to say value, random, random value, which does have a minimum and a maximum. So we will set up a minimum scale and a maximum scale. If I take this and plug it to scale, now our scale will go 0-1, but we don't want that. Let's say we want blender to put the scale from e.g. 0.05 to something, let's say like 0.1. And right now we will have trees where scale that varies from 0.05 to 0.1. And actually, this is still really huge. If I hit zero to jump to the rendered view or actually to jump to the camera view. As you can see, these trees are still really, really huge, so we need to change that. So let's try lowering these numbers even more. Or if you want to be a little bit more fancy, Let's add a math node. This is gonna be simple, don't worry. Let's add a math node and let's put it here and let's change the operation from add to multiply. And basically when I change this value, I will be able to change the scale of the different trees. So let's try 0.1. This is really small. Let's try 0.2, okay? There is a tiny tree right here. That's the 0.3. Yeah, I guess this, Let's try 0.2. Let's leave it as 0.2 for now. So right now we do have these two nodes that control the scale. Basically the first one will give us random values and then this one is like a multiplier. So if we want to make them bigger, I will bump this number up as you can see. And if I want them smaller, I will basically put this number down. And the really nice thing is whenever I change this, I'm already generating random values for each tree, so I will keep the variation between the sizes of the different trees. The second thing that we need to do right now is basically to tell blender where to distribute these trees. You might wonder why is that? Well, because as you can see, our terrain is really huge and the trees are really tiny. So in order to basically fill this entire area, we will need like huge number in the density which something like probably, I don't know, maybe 500 or 500,000 or something like that. And if we do that, probably Blender will crash. So to fix this problem, in the next video, we're going to do, or actually we're going to paint the areas we want the trees to be distributed on. We don't need to distribute e.g. trees right here because they will not be visible. We don't need to distribute areas right here because they will not be visible. But we need to distribute trees, e.g. right here and right here because they will be visible so that we can optimize our scene. And basically we don't crash blender. I will see you in the next video where we will do all of this. So yeah, see you in the next video. Bye everyone. 13. Weight Painting The Tree Areas: Hello and welcome. In this new video where we will basically do a little bit of weight painting to tell blender where we want to our trees. Okay, So this is where we stopped last time. Basically, if we are going to render a hundreds of trees, it won't make sense that we render trees in areas that we will not see simply if I just hit zero from the number pad to jump to the camera view, I don't need to render any trees that are outside of this box, which basically the camera will see all the trees that will be outside this box will just slow us down and make the render basically slower. And it will make our life in the 3D view port harder. And the second reason is generally trees will not grow on these e.g. and these edges. So it will make sense to limit the trees to certain areas in a way that is more similar to how trees in real life will grow. And as usual, there are multiple ways to do this. There is an approach that I did in my previous courses, which basically by creating elaborate nodes setup right here in geometry nodes, which a valid approach. But for the sake of making everything easy, within this course, we are going to use some actual weight painting. Now, of course I know some of you, maybe they don't know what his white painting or what does it do? Or maybe it is some complicated stuff. It is not weight painting is just a way to tell blender basically where to distribute certain elements and where you should not distribute these elements. So in our case, I'm just going to get back to the viewport shading. And let's also exit my 3D view port by moving in 3D view port. And I'm also going to disable this geometry node modifier. And boom, right now, this is my mountain. I'm going to select it and make sure to jump from the object mode to the weight paint mode. As you can see right now, everything is blue and blue in the weight painting mode means that it is zero. So here's what we will do using this really nice brush, which by the way, you can access the settings of this brush. From here, I'm going to paint the areas where I want to tell blender that, hey, blender, I want you to distribute trees right here. Here's what we'll do, e.g. if you remember my camera actually look somewhere from this angle and basically there will be some trees right here. So I'm just going to paint on the areas where I think there should be some trees. So here is a really nice trick. I'm just going to drag from here and open another 3D view port. And I'm going to click on zero on this 3D view port or jumped to the camera view. So basically by doing this, I will be able to see exactly where I'm painting. And at the same time, if you jumped to the overlay options, you will have here an option called weight paint opacity, which were basically control the opacity of this overlay so that we can see actually in a clearer way, our mountain is actually looking like. So let me just bring it also a little bit more to something like 0.5. So this setup would basically allow me to do some painting from here and see basically the result right here. So I will be able to control in a better way where I actually want to do wait painting. So probably and it also paid right here, something like so I'll probably need to do also little bit of weight painting here. And also probably I will need to draw it a little bit here on the background. So I'm going to do that here. Let me also bring my opacity a little bit down so that it looks good and clear. Let's do something like So. I guess also, if you notice there is this edge right here, probably there will not be any trees basically growing right here. So I need to change the radius of my brush from here. Let's make it smaller and make sure that your weight is set to zero so that we will be removing from this area. So just went right now when you start painting, you will be able to raise some areas. Perfect. This is looking more or less decent. If you want to refine it a little bit more, you can bring your weight up to one and do a little bit more painting basically to be able to refine the selection we made. So right now we did our weight painting and only have to do is get back to the object mode and boom, right now we've actually finished our white paint. And just for context and don't follow me in this. If I just jump back to the white paint, basically the areas that are blue, which are these areas right here, as I mentioned, blue means zero and red means basically a full opacity or let's say your full string. And all this gradient, basically from blue to red, is basically the gradual transition from no strength to full strength. And that's how you can basically tell blender, where do you want actually to distribute your elements? Now, let's get back to the object mode. And while I'm selecting this terrain 01, if I just jumped to the object data properties, you will have here something called the vertex groups. In other words, this vertex group is basically where we stored these weight paintings or these weight map that we just drew. Basically the stuff that we did in the weight pain. These red stuff are stored in this container right here. It is called group. In my case, I'm actually just going to rename this e.g. Tree density and let's also add 01 so that basically Blender will not get confused if we call another thing, greed and city and just hit. Okay? And after doing this, I'm going back to my modifiers and I'm going to enable the geometric node modifier. From here, I need to tell blender, basically using nodes that hey, blender, I want you to use this tree density weight map to drive the distribution of these different trees. In other words, I want to blend or to use this weight map to drive where basically it is distributing these different trees. Here's what we will do. Make sure you are in Geometry nodes and I'm just going to zoom in on this distribute points on faces node, which as you can probably remember, it is the node responsible on putting the points on this terrain. So if we somehow figure out a way to tell this node where to put the points, we will be able also to tell blender where to put the trees. I will say that again, this distribute points on faces node, it is distributing points on the entire terrain. If I just hit Control Shift and click on it, as you can see, it is distributing points on the entire terrain. So if we can figure out a way to tell blender where to put these points using this tree density group, who will be able to achieve the result we want. So here's what we will do. I'm just going to zoom out a little bit and I'm actually going to stay basically looking at the distribute points on faces node from here, as you can see, there is an option called density. If you look right here, it is a great socket, which mean that it accepts black and white values. And if you focus right here, there is this option called random. Basically random, we'll distribute points randomly on the surface. But when working with vegetations and especially trees, this form of distribution doesn't look that realistic. Instead of using random, we are actually going to use Poisson disk, which is just a fancier way of how you can distribute your elements on a certain surface. The really nice thing about all of that is that you will have basically this density maximum and the distance minimum. So you'll all be able to control the distance between the different elements. Because generally, trees will not grow at the same place. Probably they will grow 1 m, 2 m, 3 m away from each other. So this will allow us to get there more realistic distributions of our trees. The most important thing right now is that you will have this option called density factor, which as the name states that will basically control the density of the different points which will later become trees. If I can figure out a way to use this tree density and plug it to the density factor. I will be able to tell blender the table and I only want you to distribute the points, which will basically later become the points only on the tree density areas. Here's how we will do this. I'm going to take this density factor and take it to this point right here on the group input. I'm just going to slam it right here. And right now, if I just jumped to the Modifiers tab, you will have here something called density factor. Basically we transfer this option that used to be right here. We moved it to an option that we can basically control from the Modifiers tab, I'm going to click on this small icon right here, which looked like a spreadsheet. I'm just going to click on it. And right now we've changed it to an attribute. And that's just a fancier way of saying that we can write now use these groups that we created using the weight paint. Let me get back to the modifiers and if I just click here, you will have right here something called 0.3 density 01, which is exactly the weight paint map we drew a couple of minutes ago. So all we have to do is basically to click on it and boom, as you can see right now, these points are not distributed on the entire surface, and you will see that in a second. Now, here's an important thing when working with geometric nodes. And basically because we're going to start cranking this number up, Blender can go haywire and basically will crash and it will lose all of our work. That's why when you're distributing elements using geometric nodes, I would highly recommend that you save your file more often. That's why right now I'm scared like a lot. That's why I need to save my file. So I'm just going to go File Save As, and let's call it Thailand 06 and save as perfect right now if blender brush, I don't need to re-record this entire video anyway. I'm going to bring this density maximum to a bigger number. Let's say something like 100 or let's say something like 200. And as you can see, the points are limited to certain areas. If I just take a look around the joint geometry node basically by Control Shift and clicking on this boom, or actually I don't need this viewer node anymore, so just click on it and hit X to delete it. Basically these planes are, the trees are right now limited to only the areas where we did our weight paint. And probably we can increase this number a little bit more. Let's say something like 500. And let's also jump to the rendered view from here to see how it is actually looking. Okay, this is starting to look decent. There are a couple of things that probably I will need to change about these trees. Mainly the orientation because right now they're facing somehow in this direction, which will reveal the fact that they are just 2D planes. And basically I need to figure out a way of how to make them point to the camera so they look like they're actually 3D. That's number one and number two, I will probably need to increase the density of the trees. And number three are probably need to make these trees smaller. And that's exactly what we will be doing in the next video, where we will basically finalize the look of all of these different trees. So yeah, make sure to save your file and I will see you in the next video. These out 14. Finalize The Look of The trees: Hello and welcome. In this new video where we will finalize the look of our trees. So I'm just going to zoom a little bit out from my geometry nodes setup and here's what we need to do. The first issue that we need to address is the orientations of these different trees. Right now they are pointing like this. And this is not good because as I mentioned before, this will reveal that they are just 2D planes and we'll reveal the fact that we were cheating and this is bad. So what we need to do is basically to figure out a way to tell blender that, hey blender, we want you to make these trees points to the location of the camera. And how can we do this? Now, this is actually super simple and it is not that complicated. And straightaway, I'm not going to pretend that I figured out this by myself. I actually found this blender StackExchange boast of someone asking for the same thing, which is basically how to make your different elements points to the camera or to a certain object. And there was a really nice answer, which is right here by Mr. Hugh bow. I don't know how to pronounce this, but thank you, sir. And that's exactly the same setup that we will use and it does actually work pretty well. So here's what we will do. The first thing, I'm just going to give myself more space to actually add more nodes so that it won't be that a messy. Let's move these here and move these here. As you can see, there is an option right here called rotation, which will control the rotation of all the different instances at this point, what are the instances? There are trees. So basically this rotation will allow us to change the rotation of all of these different trees. But there is a problem if I just jump to the viewport shading so that you can see in a clearer way what's happening as you can see when I start rotating, all of them will rotate at the same time and this is not good. And here's why. Yes, these e.g. these trees right now are pointing to the camera, but these ones, they should actually going something like this. Yes, these ones would point like this, but these ones, they should be actually slightly rotated. So the main problem with this approach is that this rotation value will change the value for all the different trees are the same value. So we need somehow to figure out a smart way to tell blender that tape, e.g. for the ones that are right here, point them to the camera. And for these ones right here, they should actually point something more like so. And that's what this snowed setup will allow us to do. Here's what we will do. I'm going to go Shift a and let's look for a node called position. And I also need the location of my camera because all of these different trees should point to the cameras. So I'm just going to bring this camera from my outliner to geometry nodes. And let's make them closer because they are friends. And I'm going to add another node called vector math. We're all scared of math. I know from here I'm going to change the operation from add to subtract. Yep, subtract. And I'm going to take the position to the first socket and take the location to the second socket. And after doing this, I'm going to add one last node, which is called a line ruler, the vector. And I'm going to take the vector and plug into vector. And I'm going to take the rotation and plug it to the rotation in the instance on points note, now, uh, probably everything will go haywire and somehow they will start acting a little bit weird. In my experience, you will probably need to change this from x to y. And also you need to change the pivot from oto do Z because we want to rotate them on the z-axis. And as you can see right now, they're all pointing towards one point, which is the location of the camera. And this is exactly what we want. This is the node setup that you can use in the future in order to make your instances point to a certain point. And the last thing we are going to work right now is basically to finalize the look of these different trees. So let's do that really quick. First things first, let me go to file and save my file because I'm really scared of losing my work. And I'm going to jump to the rendered view. And let's hide all of these overlays. And there are a couple of things that we need to start addressing right now. The first thing I'm going to change is basically from here, I'm going to choose the option pick instance. You might wonder why I'm checking this option. Well, if you remember in our trees collection, which are basically the duty trees, we do have four different variations. The thing is Blender by default will only use one tree. And we want to tell blender that here, blender, we want you to pick different reason from that collection. And that's what this option pick instance will do to basically each time we'll pick a random tree from that collection. So this will give us more variations. Number two, I still think that the scale of these trees is a little bit too huge for my taste. That's why I'm going to bring the scale from this multiply node, let's say to something like 0.5. I still think they are a little bit too huge, so let's try 0.3. This is way better for my taste. Let's go to File and Save. The last thing we need to start cranking the density of all of these different trees from the density maximum. And now you need to be careful there is a high chance when you start inputting crazy huge numbers. There is a big probability that blender or crash. That's why I would really highly recommend that you save your file right now just in case. And here's what we will do. We are going to bring this density maximum to a bigger number. Right? Now, it is 500. It is really, really low. So let's crank this number two, basically by ten, which will make it 5,000. 5,000 is a little bit over killed. So let's kept it by health to 2,500. Let's try 3,000. Alright, I guess I'm just going to leave it at 3,000 for now. And maybe let's also bring the scale down from this multiply node to something like 0.2. Yeah, this is way better and I will probably need to scale or actually add to the density to something like 5,000. If you bring this distance minimum to one, Let's see how it will look like. Let's try 0.1 or let's say one again. Maybe bring this density also up to something like 7500. Okay, I'm just going to leave it for now the way it is right now. This is looking more or less decent. You can probably spend a little bit more time playing with these values that basically the density of the points, which is basically the density of the trees. And at the same time play with the scale until you get basically the perfect values that work with your scene. But the most important thing from this video is that right now, we already know how to distribute these different trees and how to make them point to the camera. And right now, it is just a matter of changing values. Spend a little bit more time playing with these different values until you get a result you are happy with. And I will see you in the next video where we will distribute some more points on the other terrain, which by the way, it is not visible because we need to hit the slash key from the number pad to show all the different elements. Boom, we will probably need to distribute some more trees on this terrain. And after that, we will be ready to start finalizing this scene. So yeah, I will see you everyone and the next video 15. Add Trees to The Background Mountain: Hello and welcome everyone in this new video where we are going to add some trees to the background mountains. Alright, so this is where we stopped last time. And as I said, we are going to add some trees to this background mountain that is lying right here. So first things first, I'm going to hit the tilta key to basically just see this background mountain. I don't want to be distracted by all the other elements, and I'm going to zoom a little bit on it. And let's just bring this just like this. And maybe also I'm going to jump back to the solid view. And from here I'm going to jump to the weight paint. And I can also from here, I'm already in weight paint, which is good, but the only thing I might do is actually to jump to the overlay so that I will be able to see also the painting from the camera view, from this view right here. I might even make it slightly bigger. And also because this is a little bit too blue and I'm not able to see all the details. So I'm going to jump right here and right here you will have an option called weight paint opacity, which as we mentioned before, it is responsible to control the opacity of this blue areas right here. So just go here and let's lower the opacity to something like 0.7 just so that we can get a closer look to what we're doing right now. We are going to do a little bit of weight painting. And here's the thing. Instead of basically painting areas that Where we will not be able to see some trees. I'm going to limit the weight painting to only these areas that are right here. So here's what I will do. I'm just going to zoom a little bit here and just paint over these areas. Now, if you find your painting really slow, That's probably because of the subdivision modifier. So here's what I will highly recommend. Just make sure to drop e.g. the levels of view port from something like 42. And basically, it is not that high-quality right now. It is not that dense. That is not a big deal because we can always crank this number up again and we'll just lowering it for the sake of having faster weight painting process. So yeah, let's just do that pretty quick. I'm just going to paint over areas where I think that there should be some trees. Now, probably, as you can see from here, it is only now, like I can only see these edges right here. These edges that are right here are the ones right here. So basically all of this area that is right here, it is actually hidden by the other trees. Even these are not necessary and I'm going to deal with that later. But for now, let me just keep on painting on the visible areas, at least where I expect to see some trees. Alright, this is looking super ugly as a shape that it is totally okay because it works. The only thing I'm going to do is to jump to the tool settings. And from here I'm going to change the weight zero so that I will be able to erase some areas. And I'm going to erase these edges right here because they will not be visible. So let's do that pretty quick. Alright, this is looking good and decent. We don't need to stress a lot about that. And as usual, if you want to polish it a little bit more and be more meticulous, you can always do that later. Let's just jump back to the Modifiers tab and I'm going to crank this number back to four. And let's get back to our usual view, which is the object mode. And also make sure to save your file just in case. Okay, So we finished doing our weight painting. And the only thing that we need to do right now is basically to distribute the trees on the areas where we did our weight painting. And just to be organized, I'm just going to jump to the object properties. And as you can see right here, I have this vertex group. It is called group. This is our weight map that we just drew. So I'm just going to change its name to something like BG tree density and hit Enter. And let's think about it. What is the element that is responsible to distributing the trees on the first terrain? It is the geometric node modifier. If I just jump here, as you can see, there is a geometric node called HDRI scatter for ground. So if I just somehow figure out a way to copy the setup to the background Mountain, which is this one. I will be able to distribute the trees. And this is super simple because as you remember, I already mentioned that when it comes to the geometry node trees, they are like the materials. You can assign them to multiple objects. Same thing for geometry nodes, they are just trees. And I'm able to assign the same geometric tree, two different objects. So from here I'm going to click first of all on new. Right now I do have my geometric node added to this object, and I'm going from here to choose three, scatter FG. I'm just going to click on it and boom. As you can see, I covered this entire mountain with a lot of trees. Now, as you can see, basically this entire terrain is covered right now with trees. And we need to fix this issue. We only want the trees to be visible on the areas where we want them to be. As you can see right now, this object as the terrain zero to all areas of the background mountain. And they added to it the three scatter FG, which is basically the node tree that I created for the foreground. I want to have, oh, no tree for the foreground and another one for the background. And here's why. If I change these settings right now, these settings will be applied to the foreground and the background. And this is not good. I will probably need lower density right here and higher density. So in a perfect world, I would love to be able to control the foreground, basically values of the node tree on their own and control the values of the notary of the background mountains on their own. This is pretty simple. All we have to do is basically to create a copy of this node tree. And here's how we do that. I'm just going to click on this small button right here, which is called Copy geometric node group. If I just click on it right now, you will see that first of all, the name change to three, scared of g001 Which means that this is a copy of the node tree that we created for the foreground. So when a change these values right here, they will only change for the background mountains because I'm working on a different node tree, not the same one that I created for the foreground. I'm just going to change it from e.g. from f G2, BG and hit Enter. And right now I'm ready to tell blender, the table lender, I want you to use the weight map. How can we do this? This is pretty simple from here. Make sure you are in the Modifiers tab. Make sure that in your density factor, which is the property we created to input our weight map, click on this. And from here I'm going to change from basically empty box to the BG tree density and just click on it and boom, right. Now we only do have our trees visible in the areas where we did our weight paint, which is exactly what we want. And as you can see, if I just jumped to the render view, but this is looking pretty decent. The only thing I, actually, I might do is to probably increase the density of these trees a little bit more, which is absolutely simple. It is as easy as going to make sure you're selecting your background mountains. And from here in the density maximum, we can crank this number to something like 10,000 and boom, right now we're having way more trees. The last issue that I want to address is related to these trees that are right here to understand exactly what I mean, they are to black and they look like they are really dense. Here's what I mean. If I just zoom on these trees that are right here, they look too dense. As you can see, they are too dense. The main reason for this problem is that basically the light is trying to pass through different transparent planes, as you remember, because these trees are just plains and this is what's giving us this illusion that they are really, really dense and this actually look ugly in my opinion. The reason for that being we do have a really nice tree density right here, e.g. in these areas right here and these areas right here. But this is like looks too ugly and to dance for my taste. So we need to lower the density on only that area. Now, of course, there are multiple ways to do this, like anything in Blender, but we are going to do really simple thing. It is not that complicated to lower the density of these trees. Here's what we will do. I'm going to hit the tilde key again while I am in this preview to basically show all the elements, again, I'm going to select my foreground mountain, and I'm going to hit again the filter keys so that I can only focus on this element. And from here, I'm going to jump from the object mode that the weight paint mode, which as you can probably remember, it is where we painted the areas where we want our trees to be visible. I'm going to jump from here to the normal view. And I'm going to disable the geometric node Modifier by clicking on the screen. I will only hide it on the viewport, but we'll be able to render it later. So all I have to do is basically to figure out a way to make the density of this area right here slightly smaller or less? Yeah. Make the density less or smaller. I don't know. Anyway, this is really simple. All I have to do is basically to jump from here to the brush tool of the white paint. And I'm going to e.g. to drag the way to the hapless, say something like 0.5. And right now, if I just paint over these areas, I will not remove it, but I will be able to make it smaller or lesser, whatever it is, I will just basically lower the value of the density. And this should give us exactly the look what we're looking for. Basically to lower the density on this area right here. I think that this is pretty simple, okay? I'm trying to make it as green as possible because I'm a perfectionist. Everyone says that, anyway, this is looking good. Let's try to activate the modifier again by clicking on this. And maybe let's hide all the overlays from here and jump to the rendered view. And yeah, I think this is way, way better. This is looking more realistic. And as you can see, the tree density right now, it is not as heavy as it used to be, and it is more comforting for the eye. And also I will not have that ugly black blob that used to be there. So yeah, this is an issue that we fixed it. So let's just jump back to the white paint, to the object mode and boom, right now we added our different trees basically to the foreground and the background. And in the next video, we are going to start finalizing this scene for the final render, basically by adding some background mountains. So yeah, I will see you in the next video, everyone. And also make sure to save your file as usual 16. Add Background Mountains: Hello and welcome. In this new video where we will basically add some background mountains. In this video, we are going to finalize the look of our different mountains. First of all, by adjusting a small setting in our background mountain and you will know what I mean in a second. And secondly, by adding some more depth to the scene, by adding some background mountain. And I will show you a way of how you can do this almost without increasing your render time. Because if we are going to duplicate the scene or these mountains multiple times, That's a great recipe to increase our render time significantly. And we might encounter some issues when basically rendering blender might crash. So let's do this. The first thing I just want to mention is that first of all, the background mountain is not visible here because the last time I jumped to the local view in the foreground mountain. So I'm just going to hit the Tilde key to just show all the different elements. And here's the problem I'm talking about. If I just zoom on here, you will notice that all of these trees that are on the background element, they are pointing like this, okay? Even though my camera is right here, so they should actually point to the camera. And I need to solve this problem. This is actually pretty simple. All we have to do, make sure you're selecting your background mountain or it rains there too. And right here in the geometric node tree, you will have here, as you remember, an option for a line older two vector. If you remember, this is the node responsible to aligning all the different tree planes to the camera. And all you have to do is basically to just change the axis from y to z and boom, right now, all of these planes are pointing to the camera perfectly and we solve this issue right now, let's move on to creating the background mountains. Alright, everyone, here is what we are going to do. I'm going to create a new collection and I'm going to call it to De Zhe mountains and hit Enter. This collection will basically be the main driver for all this stuff related to the 2D mountains that are just 2D planes basically, here's what we will do. I'm going to select both of these two, basically this one and this one. And I'm going to hit Shift D to duplicate them and then hit the right mouse button to cancel any movement. And then I'm going to hit M to move them to a new collection and choose to DPG mountains. Boom, right now I created another copy of these terrains, but in this new collection, I'm going to disable the first collection. So I only can see this 2D BG mountains. And I'm going to remove the geometric node or actually, let's just disable it like this. And also in the terrain there too, let's just disable it. So I will only have the terrain pieces and make sure you're selecting this collection. I'm going to go Shift a and add another camera. And I'm going to rename this e.g. 2D, BG mountains hammer super creative names. But the problem is that whenever I will hit zero, I will still jump to the first camera, the camera that we created originally, the one that we will use for rendering. We need to solve that issue basically by jumping to the scene. And right here, you will find an option called camera, which is what Kim or a blender will use to render the scene. In our case, it's still using the old cameras. So we need to tell blender that table under we want you to use the second camera that we created. So just click on here and right now we're seeing nothing because probably our camera is pointing in a weird direction. If I just select this camera and jumped to the camera settings, I can definitely increase the size to something like, let's say 100 meter, still not visible when thousand meter. What is this camera there? It is, right here Beneath the mountains. Here's what we'll do. I'm going to hit e.g. one to jump to the front view. And I'm going to hit Control Alt zero to basically move the camera to my point of view, e.g. if I want to move the camera to an angle like this, I'm going to hit Control Alt zero. In my case, I want the camera to be pointing straight to the mountains. So I'm going to hit one, as I mentioned, to jump to the front view. And from here I'm going to do Control Alt zero. And right now my camera is pointing straight to the mountains. And I can be sure about this by just jumping to the object properties. And as you can see, the rotation on the x is 90. And what I'm gonna do right now is basically e.g. to move slightly back. What I'm trying to do is basically to put both of these two mountains close to each other. So let's select the second terrain and hit G, x and move it like this. Also, I can hit seven to jump to the top view and g, y to move it somewhere like this and do this. And maybe let's create another copy of this bad boy. By hitting, instead of hitting Shift D, you can hit Alt D to create a linked copy which will be faster to render and all. And let's, It's similar, rotate z, something like so that's really perfect. Maybe I can select all of them and hit S and Z to scale them on the z axis a little bit to make them bigger and boom, this is what we have right now. And right now, if I just jumped to the rendered view right here, Let's see how it looks. Boom. I see a small gap right here. So maybe I should lower this slightly down. Boom. This is perfect. The whole shebang behind what we're trying to do. We are going to render this image and we are going to put it in the background. And because they are really formed mountains, there is no way someone will be able to tell like, Hey, that those are just too deep Mountains. That's the whole idea behind what I'm doing. Just one important thing because we play the letter bit with the location and the rotation of the different mountains, we need, at least to make sure that our lighting to a certain extent matches the original scene. And just to verify this, I'm just going to disable temporarily this to DVG mountains. I'm just going to disable it and I'm going to enable my main collection and I'm going to change from the camera to the camera. Okay. So the lighting, as you remember, is coming from this direction. We need to try to keep the same direction in our 2D Mountain Plains. I'm going to disable this and get back to the 2D BG mountains and make sure also to from camera change it to do to DVG mountains. And yeah, that's almost the same direction. I might later change the color to make them more orange-ish so that it looks like it is actually in sunset. But for the light direction, I think that this will work. Now, it is as easy as just, I'm going to go File and Save As to save this blender file just in case, let's say this plus to make it ten and Save As. And I'm going to render this image. This will be super simple. I'm just going to jump to the viewport shading because that does have the potential to slow the render. And I'm going to go to Render Render image. And let's wait for this 2D mountains to render. Alright, our render just finished and here's the final result we got. And all you have to do is basically to go to Image Save. As I'm going to jump to the folder where I want to save in the student resources under assets. Let's go to the mountains, PNG. And for the settings, make sure it is PNG and make sure also it is RGBA. The a stands for alpha, so we will also render the transparency with this image. Keep this at eight. We don t need 16-bit, and let's give this at 15 and just hit Save As image. And right now we do have our 2D mountains, and that is about time to add them, our scene. And this will be super simple. Let's just do that. I'm going to close the render tab and I'm going to disable the CDBG mountains collection because we don't need it anymore. Let's get back to our original camera and original angle and let's enable this view again. This is our usual view and if you remember, we activated an add-on in the early videos. It is called Import Images as Planes, and that's the add on we will use to import our 2D mountains. So just go to File, Import Images as Planes. And in the assets folder you will have to the mountains dot PNG and just click Import Images as Planes. And this is our 2D plane, as you can see right here. It is super huge right now, but we will fix that. Let me just jumped to the render view and just hit R to rotate it on the z-axis. What I'm trying to do is basically to make it point directly to the camera. So that basically 12 point directly to the camera in order to hide the illusion that it is just a 2D plane, you can hit also seven to jump to the top view. And let me just get back to the viewport shading just to save a little bit of performance. And let's move this somewhere right here. Let's say this will be our first plane. And let's just jumped to the render view to see the final result, how it looked like. Okay, as you can see, we're adding some mountains right here, and they look actually kinda nice. The only thing I might consider doing is to move it a little bit up on the z-axis, hit G to move it on the z-axis. And let's bring it a little bit up, something like so. That's a little bit too much because I'm starting to see a gap right here. So g, Z and move it slightly down. And this is perfect. Right now we are going to duplicate this another time to try and hide this seam right here. If you just focus a little bit, criteria will note is that this is the end of our image. That's why it is somehow cut out. So let's hit seven to jump to the top view and hit Shift D to create another copy. And let's move it somewhere right here. What I'm trying to do is basically to hide that seem right there. So I might move it a little bit in front of the other one by hitting G and Z, Z to move on for local axis, Let's move it slightly forward and hit G to move it on the global axis, on the z axis, a little bit up, I guess this is will be more than enough. In our case, we added some good background mountains to add more depth. And I'm just going to select both of them, hit M to move them to a collection and just create a new collection. And let's call it 2D mountains and hit. Okay, and one last thing before we actually finish, make sure to select this e.g. to the mountains. And let's jump to the shader editor. Make sure you are in worldview or it should be an object. And this is older material. Make sure that in your material make sure to increase the roughness up to one so that it will not look weird or the light will hit that 2D plane in a weird way. And other than that, that's it for this video. And I will see you in the next video where we are going to add some fog planes to add even more depth to our scene. So yeah, I will see you in the next video. 17. Add Fog Planes: Hello and welcome everyone in this new video where we are going to add some fog planes to add a little bit more depth to our scene. The fault planes are basically just transparent planes that will act like a layer of haze or dust or fog in our scene, which will help merge and give the depth that we need to our scene. Because yes, we added some background mountains and we tried to fake our way through that, but adding some focal planes will actually take it to the next level. And surprisingly, to be super simple, and it will not increase our render time significantly. Here's what we will do. First of all, I'm just going to, from here, I'm going to just jump to the viewport shading to save a little bit of performance. And I'm going to go Shift a, and let's add mesh, and let's add a plane. This plane right now is really, really tiny. One I will suggest is basically you need to increase the size to something, let's say like 2000 or let's say 5,000 m so that it will cover the entire horizon. Okay, that's 5,000 and maybe I will make it smaller and the y-axis. So hit Tab to jump to the edit mode as y only scale it on the y axis. And let's say 0.1 or let's say 0.20, 0.3 or 0.40, 0.4 will work and just hit Enter and hit tab again to exit the edit mode, this plane will be our fog plane. I'm going to hit R, acts to rotate on the x-axis and type 90 to rotate it 90 degree. And that's number one. Let's hit seven to jump to the top view. And we need to basically align it the same way as the camera. They both need to be like this. So if you want to be precise, you can jump e.g. to the camera. So basically you can copy this number Control C and then jump to the plane. And in your z just hit Control V and hit Enter. And right now they are perfectly aligned as all things should be. I'm going to hit G and move it slightly to the back ground, something like So I guess I'm going to rotate it a little bit more just so that it will basically act as a separation between the foreground and the background. And at the end of the day, because it is just a 2D plane, it will not show or because we are going to create a gradient, the effect that it is just a 2D plane will not be visible. That's what I'm trying to say. So yeah, this will work, I guess. I hope, and I'm going to hit the Tilde key to just jump to the local view. And also from here let's say tilta key to just jump to the local view and let's jump to the rendered view. This is just a really boring to the plane and we need to create a material for it to act as a fog plane. I'm going to click on New to create a new material. And I'm going to call it fog plane. What we are trying to achieve is basically a gradient that starts from white. I don't see the overlays that starts from white and then it will go transparent. White to transparent. Let's do this. I'm going to add a texture called the gradient texture. So go shift a, it has to search and look for gradient texture. This one, I'm going to add it. And if you hit Control Shift and click on it, as you can see, it is gradient from white to black and I need to rotate it. I want it to be from the bottom up. Rotate it all we have to do, make sure you're selecting your gradient texture node and hit control D to add a mapping note to it, which will allow us to rotate it. We are going to rotate it basically on the z-axis, let's say -90. And this is not what we want. We want basically the white from to be on the bottom. So let's try 90. It is right now black. So, but technically if you move the location of the x, 1 m or less, say 1,000. Yeah, we'll get the result. We want basically gradient from white to transparent. We are going to turn the black areas into transparent areas in just a second. Yeah, this is exactly the gradient. We want bed somehow the falloff or the gradient is somehow not. It is really short, almost happened only on this area. We want it to be a little bit more smooth. To do this, we can add something that a lot of people hate, which is a math node. So just go Shift a and let's look for math node. Let's put it here. And in the operation, make sure to change it from add to power. And when you start increasing this number, we can start making this gradient way, way smoother. And let's say something like five, I guess will be good or let's try. Yeah, let's give it a three. This will be good. It is as easy as just connecting this power node. Let's connect it to the Alpha. Let's connect it to the alpha and Control Shift and click on the principle be SDF and boom, we created a fog plane. As you can see, it starts really opaque as white. Let's just hide the overlays and then it will go transparent. And this transparency right here is what will allow us to get the look like. It is actually a fog plane. I might play a little bit with some more settings. Let's increase the roughness up to one where if we lower the specular, okay, this will not make a change. So let's just skip it at 0.5 and boom, this is our fog plane. I'm going to hit the tilta key just to get back to my usual view. And boom, as you can see, it is really, really hazy. Let's set also the tilt or key here. And let's move this bad boy slightly down by hitting g, z. Let's move it down, down, down, down. Let's hit G to move it a little bit up. It is always a process of trying to nail the right look. And right now we are going to duplicate this fog plane another time to put it even further in the background. So just hit seven to jump to the top view. And let's hit Alt D to create another copy. And let's move it somewhere right here, basically in front of them. Other 2D mountains. So let's say somewhere right here, I guess it will be good. Let's just jump to the solid view to have basically blender faster. And let's hit our Z to rotate it, something like so. And hit G double Z twice to move it on the local axis. And let's put it here. And this technically should look good. Let's hit the render view to see how it looked like. And yeah, I'm actually digging this result. And the last thing I'm just going to do, because these planes would abstract my view. I'm going to jump to in the object. From here, you will have an option called viewport display. Just make sure to change it from display as texture, change it to wire so that basically it will be transparent and I can see through it. And same thing for this bad boy. Let's select it and change the display ads from texture, the wire, and also make sure to select both of them, hit M to move them to a new collection rate, a new collection, and let's call it fog, planes hit. Okay. This is how you can create 2D planes to add little details and add more depth to our scene. And I will see you in the next video where we are going to create the camera animation and add a gobo to our scene. And you will know exactly what I mean. I will see you in the next video. Everyone 18. Adding GOBO and Camera Animation: Hello and welcome. In this new video where we are basically going to do two things. The first one being creating the camera animation for the shot, and the second thing, which is basically we are going to add a gobo for our lighting. And that's exactly what I will start with creating a gobo. Now, what is a gobo? Gobo or just a shape that can form or change the shape of the lighting. And this will allow us basically to get a better and more moody lighting in our scene. So here's what we will do. First of all, I'm going to go Shift a and I'm going to add a plane. This plane would already be huge because we already created a 5,000 meter plane before. And here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to jump to the local view by hitting the tilta key. And also I'm going to move my cursor right here and hit the Tilde key to only see this 2D plane. And if we're doing this, I'm going to create a new material and I'm going to call it gobo. And simply all I have to do is basically to add a texture to this, I'm going to go Shift a and let's look for noise texture, this one right here, and hit Control T to add the mapping note to it. And I'm going to plug the factor to the base color. And as you can see, this is the texture we have right now. I need it to be a little bit more contrasty. That's what I'm going to add, a color ramp node, which will allow me to control the levels and the contrast and all of those stuffs. I go Shift a and let's look for color ramp. And I'm going to put it right here. And all you have to do is basically to crunch this image a little bit to something like so that's maybe crunch it a little bit more. Okay, This is good. I can also bring the roughness a little bit down. You can even like put a zero. It won't matter to be honest, but let's make it, leave it at 0.5. And for the scale, I mean, probably you can leave it at five for now. And if we feel the urge to change it, we can always change it. The most important thing that you need to do right now is basically to also take the output which is the color, and also plug it to the trends. The Alpha makes sure to plug it to the Alpha. So you will have this form that looks like clouds that imagine what will happen when the light will hit it. Basically these white areas will obscure some lighting and basically it will cast shadow on our terrain. And that's what will give us a more moody lighting. And that's exactly what we will do. So I'm going to hide my overlays again, hit the tilta key to show my entire scene and also hit the tilde key here also to show my entire scene. And I'm going to basically Zhe Xie to move it a little bit, let a bit up. Basically it shouldn't be visible. My scene is starting to get slower because we're starting to add a lot of different elements. I think I'm going to increase the scale a little bit, let's say to something like ten. And also since the lighting is coming from this direction, basically from here, I probably should rotate this plane to match the direction of the light so that it will actually be able to obscure some areas to make everything faster. I'm just going to jump to the viewport shading and let's do this. I'm going to hit R to rotate it a little bit on the y-axis. And maybe also I'm going to hit S to scale it a little bit down and hit Control. Apply the scale and g x may be to move it a little bit like so maybe g z to move it up so that it will not be visible in the final shot. Yeah, I guess something like this will work. I can even e.g. jump to this view which has the viewport shading just temporarily to see what's happening. Okay, so this is the texture we do have. Yeah, I guess this will work. So let's see how the final result is looking. Okay, Part of me thinks that I need to increase the contrast a little bit more. I'm going to increase a little bit more. And lastly, if I change the location e.g. on the y-axis, I will be able to move this gobo. As you can see. I know probably the video might be lagging because it's kinda slow to render the scene right now that in your scene you will start to notice that the shadow is moving. It is like there are clouds in the scene and the shadow of those clouds is moving on the ground. So basically it is as easy as finding or basically experiment with your scene, especially this location y and location x until you get a result that you're happy with. In my case, I'm just going to leave this at zero because I kinda like the result we just have right now. Let's move on to the last part, which is creating the camera animation. So yeah, Let's do that. For the camera animation. This will be super simple. I'm going to jump to the viewport, the usual viewport shading because I don't want to slow blender down. And I'm going to jump from the shader editor to the timeline to basically be able to create some keyframes. And it seems like I created some keyframes on an object. Okay, these are the annotation, so I'm just going to delete them. The annotation is basically these lines that I tend to draw to explain stuff. Those are the annotations we want to animate the camera, the way of how I imagined this camera to move. If I just hit seven to jump to the top view, whereas the camera okay, where's my camera? Okay. What happened to the camera? Okay, it is under this, okay. Basically the way of how I imagined this camera to be, It's like it will rotate on an arc that looks something like this. So it will end. It will always be pointing e.g. to the middle of the scene and it will rotate along this arc. And that's exactly what we are going to do. We need first of all to set a point to tell blender where this camera should rotate, I'm going to go Shift a and let's add an empty object, empty and plain axis. I'm going to go Zhe Xie to move it a little bit up. And basically, I'm going to try and put this empty object on the point of interest, the point that the cameras should spin around, if that makes sense. If I just hit seven to see how everything is looking, let me just for this plane, hide it just for now so that I will be able to see the empty object. I want e.g. the camera to spin around this peak that is right here. I'm also going to go GZ to move it a little bit up. Yeah, that's the point I want to spin around. And after doing this, all you have to do, make sure you select your camera and then select the empty object and then hit Control P to parent them or to link them and then select object. Right now what happened is that this camera is linked to this empty object. And if I just select the empty object and they hit R, e.g. Z. Notes what will happen? Basically able to get the movement that I want to do, which is basically spinning around that point. The whole thing, it is as easy as just animating this empty object. So here's what we will do. I'm going for the, for the terrain one to make a blender faster, I'm going to just disable temporarily the tree scatter so that I will only see the planes are actually I only want to see the terrain. So just to make a blender faster, Let's move to the first frame, which is number one. Now we are going to set up the initial position. The initial position, let's say I want it to be our z and let's move it to something like so, something like this. And I'm going to go for the location and also I or the rotation. And let's write now move to the last frame. The shot will be 5 s, so five multiplied by 24 frames, that will give us 120. So the last chart should be 120 frames long. So I'm going to go to 120, hit our z and let's move it to somewhere like so until yeah, and hit I for available. And if I get back to my initial frame zero and I hit play, okay, it is super laggy because there's a lot of subdivisions in my scene. Let me just jump back to the terrain and let me disable e.g. the subdivision one and disabled or to the subdivision two for both of the terrains. And let's hit Play. Let's hope it works. Yeah. That's how my camera animation will look like. As you can see, it is like slowly flying over the entire landscape when we're thing that always happen when you do animate is that the camera animation, we'll start slow and then it will go fast and then it will slow down. We wanted to keep the same velocity on the entire shot. That's why I'm going to select all the keyframes and hit D and make sure to change it to linear. And if I play it right now, should keep the same velocity along the entire shot. And this is the camera animation. I'm going to use a super cinematic. It is subtle, but it looks like the self we see in movies. And that's, I think the key ingredient. If you want to create a super realistic or let's say a cinematic camera movements in your shots. I'm going to leave it at this. I'm just going to re-enable all the different modifiers so that I will be able to see the final scene also the geometric note. I forgot that one and yeah, I'm just going to hit file and save just in case. Let's see our final result. Okay, so this is the shot we do have. And in the next video, I'm going to show you how you can basically break down the scene into its different layers and basically prepare it for the final render. So yeah, I will see you everyone in the next video. 19. Breakdown the Scene to Render Layers: Hello and welcome. In this new video where we are basically going to prepare this blender file for rendering. And what I mean by that is that basically to break down this scene into different layers, layers are basically just different elements that we will render separately. So that first of all, later on we can adjust them separately. Just as an example, I'm going to render the foreground mountain on its own to that later on. I can change it and maybe e.g. do some coloring on its separately. And same thing for the background mountain, the sky, and all the different Say, components of my scene. So that's the first advantage. I can change and manipulate each element separately on its own. And the second thing, there is a high chance that if I try to render the scene now, all at ones blender might crash and basically stop middle render. And I don't want that. So to make it easier for blender to render, I can tell blend with the tag. You can render each element on its own so that basically we will lower the computing power on Blender. And we can guarantee that we will be able to render even like huge scenes, just by the fact that we can break them into different layers. Okay, so let's discover how we can do that. Secret behind how you can break down into different layers is actually in the outliner. From here, we can choose what other layers we do have. Right now we only have one layer, which is called the view layer, which I'm actually going to rename to something like master. So this is the master layer. We're not going to render this. This will just act as a reference for all the stuff that we will do. And here's the most important thing. Right now. I'm going to disable all the different elements and I'm going to start to organize all the different elements. I'm going to organize all the different objects. So let's start first of all with this bad boy, which is called the plane zeros 02. And this is, if you remember, this is the Gobo light. This is the plane that does have holes in it. I'm going to rename it to something like gobo. And I'm actually going to put it inside the collection. It is this collection right here. I'm going to move it and put it inside collection, okay? Also, I just forgot to mention one important concept. You can think of collections as its own layer. So e.g. I. Want this terrain 01 to be it's on its own layer to render it on its own. That's why I need to select your terrain one, which is the one on the foreground. I'm going to hit M to move it to a new collection and hit New Collection. And I'm going to rename it to e.g. FG mountain or I wrote I misspelled mountain. Perfect. And hit okay, this is our foreground mountain. I'm just going to disable this collection. I also want to render this background Mountain which is terrains or two on its own. Make sure you select it, hit M to create a new collection, new collection, and let's call it BG mountain and hit. Okay, and let's just disable this collection. I also have some background to the mountains which are already here. Perfect. I'm going to render them on their own. And also for this guy, I'm going to create a separate collection for this guy. I'm going to hit M New Collection and let's call it Sky Kay, and Boone VLS element, which is this empty object, which is the empty object is the one responsible to animate the camera. I'm going to rename it to something like camera trawler. Okay. And I'm going to move it to the main collection, which basically contain all the different elements in our scene and make sure it is visible perfective. These are all the different elements that we are going to render. From here, we can create, as I mentioned, different layers. This first one is called Master. I'm going to leave it the way it is. I'm not going to change anything because we will need it later. And then I'm going to create a new one by clicking on this button right here. And you will have an option called Copy Settings. I'm just going to hit Copy Settings. And from here I'm going to rename this one to e.g. FG mountain. So this will be our foreground mountain and I'm going to enable the collection called Zhe mountain. Just click here and boom, if I just jumped to the rendered view, basically Blender will render a sequence of images that looks like this. So I will have the foreground mountain as a separate image sequence, which is really nice because later on I can play with this mountain the way I want. Let me just get back to the solid view to make everything faster. And I'm going to create to click here and copy settings. And for this one I'm going to call it BG mountain. Mountain is only one mountain. I'm going to disable the foreground mountain and I'm going to check BG mountain. So this is my collection for the background mountain. Also, if I just focus a little bit here, I can see this plane which is the gobo. I'm just going to hit G to move it outside the frame. Perfect. So this is our layer for the background mountain. Let's create another one by doing copy settings. And for this one, I'm going to call it 2D mountains, the ones that are in the far background. And I'm going to disable the bag, the BG mountain, and I'm going to enable to the BG mountains or not this one. To the mountains. Yeah, Perfect. If I just jumped to the render view, that's how my image sequence will look like. Let's create one less layer Copy Settings, and this one will be a sky. So just disable the 2D mountains and enable this kind. And if I click right here, you will have all the different layers that we are going to use in this scene. Now, if you remember, I said that we will need the master later. I just check master, I'm actually going to enable all the different elements, the sky, the BG mountain, the foreground mountain, also the fog planes, and the 2D mountains. So these are all the different elements I need. Oh, actually I forgot one thing. I also need to create another collection for the fog planes because I'm going also to render them though. Let me just get back to the 2D mountains. I'm going to create this and copy settings, and I'm going to call this fog planes. I need also to render the fog planes and I'm going to disable this and enable the fog planes. But if I just jumped to the render view, as you can see, if I render this image or a sequence of images that looks like this. This will basically just an overlay. This will cover the entire image. So somehow I need to tell blender to only render the Fog only where it should be visible. And how can we do this? That's actually pretty simple. All we have to do is you click right here on this filter. Make sure you enable this option which is called hold out. If I just click on this and I'm going to enable the collections that does have some elements that I don't want the font to cover. In other words, I want to enable the FG mountain. And I also need to click on this really tiny button which is called holdout and look what will happen. Boom, right now, it looks like I'm using this foreground mountain as a mask or the fog planes and that's exactly what I want because I don't want any sort of func to be in the foreground mountain. And later on basically we will have some fog. So make sure to enable this collection and make sure also to check hold out. That's for the fog planes. And now we can get back to our master. And in this master file, I'm going to use it to render a mist pass. Now, you might wonder, hey, your scene or dismissed as well. There is an image that looks like this, which will help us later to composite our shot and add some haze and some extra space to make our shot better. And that's exactly what we will do we are going to create, and this bears using this master layer. So yeah, let's just do that in order to tell blender that, Hey, we want you to actually render a mist pass. There are a couple of steps that you need to follow. First things first, right here in the render passes, make sure to check missed so that Blender will start considering that, Hey, we want to render MS. bass, that's number one. Number two, you need to jump to your camera. It is inside camera controller and jumped to the settings. And you will have here an option for or I guess they moved it safe areas now. Viewport display. Yeah. You will have here an option under view-port display cold mist, and make sure to check missed. And if I zoom on my camera, you will notice that there is this line right now in the camera, and that comes out of the camera. Here's how the mismatch will look like. If I just jump from here and render paths, I'm going to change from combined to missed. This is how our misspells is looking. The result we want to achieve is the foreground should be black and it will gradually goes white. That's exactly what we want, but how can we do this? Well, you need to go to the World settings, choose this one right here, or the World properties. And right here you will have an option called MySpace. And from here we can tell blender the point of where we want to start calculating them as pairs and where it will be the end point. And by playing with these two different values, we will be able to adjust that the storage will basically control where basically Blender will start calculating and the depth will control the end point for the start. So let's just lower the start to something like zero. So basically it will start from the camera. And let's also make the depth something like 5,000 meter. Yeah, I'm kinda digging this result. As you can see, we're having a gradient that starts from black and goes to white. Later on we can play by adjusting some contrasts and all of that we can adjust, this must pass, but this is good for what we want. And now I'm just going to go file and save my blender file so that I don't lose all my organization. And that's it for this video. And the next one, I'm going to show you how you can basically prepare your rendering no tree inside the compositing workspace. And that's really important. So yeah, I will see you in the next video. Bye everyone. 20. Create The Rendering Node Tree: Hello and welcome everyone in this new video where we are going to prepare our compositing node tree. Okay, this is where we stopped last time. And I'm going to jump back to the viewport shading so that I don't want blender to slow down. And from here I'm going to jump to the compositing workspace. What is compositing? Compositing is the process. What happens once you finish a rendering your shot? This is the post rendered process. Our goal right now is basically to build a new tree to tell blender where to render each element and how can we do that? This is actually pretty simple. Here's what we will do. Make sure that your cursor is inside the compositor. Hit Control Spacebar to maximize this editor so it will be full screen so we can see everything clearly. And from here, I'm going to show you how to render one layer. And we're just going to duplicate this set-up for all the different elements. So here's what we will do. I'm going to basically just move this composite known up and I'm going to go Shift a and I'm going to look for file output. So let's just put it here and connect the image to the image. Here's how the whole process will happen. As you can see, this node is called render layers. So from here, I'm going to tell blender for this first one, I want you to render only the foreground mountain. After we render the foreground mountain, it will be denoised and this file output node, it will output the final result. And basically we need to adjust some settings in this final output, you can go to options are actually node Properties. Yeah, right here we can play with all the different settings for this node, the file output, what is the format of the final images? We don't want it to be PNG, we want it to be open edX czar, because that's the most flexible format, we can use n instead of the Kodak, instead of using a zip lossless, which will give you huge file. Based on my experience and what I found on the internet, I would highly recommend that you use DW a lossy, which almost, almost will give you the same quality. But we're like really small files. And I think unless you're going to screen your video on a cinema or something, there is no way anyone will notice that whether it is zip lossless or dw a lawsuit, use DW a lossy because it will give you a faster render and it is easier for your computer and it will give you smaller files with no sacrifice when it comes to quality. So just choose DW, a lossy. And from here make sure to change the name of these different images to something like F, G, mountain, boom. And for the path where we want to save all of these, just click here. These are some old renders. I'm going to go to blend of projects and I'm going in the Student Resources, I'm going to create a new folder and I'm going to call it a render and just click on Render and hit accept. And by the way, Blender will automatically create a folder inside this folder inside, if you remember, because we created this folder called Render Blender will create a folder for each element and that's what this file subpath do to create a folder inside that folder called every mountain. And it will put over different image inside that folder. That's really handy option also, I'm just going to cut this option right here so that I don't want to see this composite node. And this is the basic setup for each layer. What I need to do right now is as easy as just hitting Shift D to duplicate the setup. And I'm going to change Zhe mountain to Biji mountain. And also I need to change this to be G mountain, to change the name of the basically all the files and then select both of these Shift D to duplicate them. And let's choose the next layer which will be, it doesn't matter honestly the order of selecting them. I just want to render them in the order of I want to composite them, but you can randomly select them. I'm going to choose to the mountains and make sure you select this. And let's rename this to know from here to 2D mountain. Alright, nice. Let's also select both of these shift D, and let's run choose from here, let's choose the fog planes. Let's select this and let's rename this to fog explains, enter and select both of these shift D1 less time, or actually we still need to do it one more time. And from fog plane, I'm going to choose sky. And let's rename this to sky. And the last one, which is that the mist bass, as you remember, I'm going to render it using the master layer. So I'm going to select one or all of these one last time Shift D to duplicate them. And I'm going to choose the master and the master. I don't want to render any of these like denoising normal and albedo and all of these stuff. I only want it to render messed pass. So I'll just connect the midst to the image and it will get denoised. And then it will be basically saved to my hard drive. And I'm going to rename this to missed. The last thing we are going to do right now is to just, first of all, let's check our node tree. We do have five layers to render 12,345.6. Yeah, I forgot them as best. We do have six layers to render. This one for the midst and five other layers. Right now, if I just go render and render animation, I will start rendering. But there is one other thing that you can do to make your render faster. Basically, here's what we will do. I'm going to jump back to, back to previous to get to my usual view and in my render settings, if you remember, we do have this option for the max samples for the render by default or not by default. In the beginning of this course, we adjusted this number to be 128. And that's the main basically number I'm going to use to render all the different elements, but there are some layers that doesn't need all of these samples, e.g. the sky doesn't need to use 128 samples, and we will just waste some computer resources on layers that doesn't need all of these samples. That's why I would highly recommend that we go through each one layer and we adjust like the render settings or let's say the samples each layer separately. So let's just do that. First of all, for the master, which is the layer we are going to use for the midst pass. I don't want it to be 128. I want it to be only 32 because I don't need like high sample count when it comes to the misspells, I'm not going to render the image out of master when it comes to the master, if you remember in the node tree, I'm only going to render the midst pass and I don't need 128 samples, I'm going to lower to 32. But the catch is, you don't change it from here. You need to jump to your output properties or actually to your hair properties or in the view layer and in the bottom, you should have override this option called override. And I can choose a different sample count for this one, I'm going to put it 32. This layer, the master, which is basically the best path, will only render a 32 samples which is more than enough. Then let's go to the sky, Let's jump to the sky. And also for this guy, I'm going to use 32 because it is just an image. It doesn't have any 3D data. So it makes more sense to only render it at 32. But yeah, this is our final setup. I'm going to go File, Save As, and I need to, I need to make sure that I save my blender file just in case. And right now, dear friends, you are ready for rendering. You can let your computer render overnight or you can use some render forums if you have access to it, or if you have a really beefy computer, you can render your scene on your own. The thing is, what will happen right now is a very long process that everyone hates. It is called rendering. It takes time. So just go to Render and Render Animation and just wait for blender to render your entire scene. Hopefully, I will see you on the other side once you've finished rendering to do the final step which is compositing. See you everyone there. 21. Compositing Part 1: Hello and welcome. In this new video where we are basically going to start doing the compositing work. What is compositing, as they always say, it is basically combining all the different elements together to create the final shot. Now, technically after we finished rendering from the last video, you should have these different folders. And in each folder you will have an image sequence of the different elements. Each folder correspond to one rendering layer, the 2D mountains background, mountain, foreground mountain, fog, mist, and sky. Now, some of you said that, hey, after the render is finished, we found that blender dumped or the image sequences in one folder. It didn't create these subfolders, honestly, I think that's some sort of a glitch in Blender. But in case that happened to you, I guess you have two options. Either you can just leave them the way they are and basically just deal with them. Because blender later, we'll import each image sequence on its own. That's why it's not a big deal even if they are in the same folder or to make them more organized, you can easily just create these subfolders yourself and put each image sequence on its own folder and they shouldn't be actually in sequence. So we don't need to look for all the different images and all of that. It should be either way. Let's right now jump into compositing. And the first thing some of you might think that I'm going to actually open the blender seen from before. Actually, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to start a fresh blender seem to make everything faster. So from here I'm just going to open lender launcher. And this is just a custom installer I always used for basically recording the videos. But in your case, all you have to do is to just launch the usual Blender version you do have, it should work the same. Anyway, this is Blender and I'm not gonna do anything here. The first thing I'm going to do is to directly jump into compositing. Compositing, I'm going to hit into high the sidebar also. Let me just move this below and make sure to check use notes and let's start working first things first, I'm going to delete both of these two nodes by selecting them and just hit X to delete them. Then I'm going to start importing all the different image sequences that I have rendered. So go to add. You should have input and you will have image. And let's just put it right here. This node is basically the node responsible for importing the image sequence. We will use click on Open. And from here I'm going to jump to render and I'm going to import the first thing which is this guy which is the farthest element from us. Let's select the sky. Make sure to select the first image. Let's move way, way down, select Shift, click Shift, and then select the last photo to basically select all of them and click on Open Image. And boom, right now we imported the image sequence that belongs to the sky. As you can see, we have frame number one, frame, the number of frames is 120, which is the exact length of our animation. And all of these settings, they should be fine for now. Right now, I'm going to hit Shift D to duplicate it also makes sure to click on this tiny magnet right here, so they will stick nicely to the grid. Let's click on this and let's write num after the sky. Let's import for the 2D mountains. I'm trying to import them, let's say in order from the farthest element to the closest element to the camera. Also when weird quirk in blender that when you hit Control a, I'm not able to select all of the different elements. I don't know why. So you always need to just select them like this by hitting Shift and then selecting all the different images. Let's click on Open Image, Shift D to duplicate it. Again, click on this. Let's move up and let's write now after the 2D mountains, we will have the background mountain. And actually, I guess let's click on this relative. Yeah, I guess there is no option for image sequence. You will need to select them in this really stupid way, shift. And let's do this open image. Let's hit Shift D again, and let's click on this. Right now in poor the foreground mountain, boom. Click on Open Image. Okay, So these are the main elements. We still have the midst pairs and the fog. We're going to add them later. But right now we're just going to combine all of these different elements together. But before I start combining them, there are a couple of things that we need to change because this is fresh blender scene. It doesn't have the same resolution and aspect ratio as basically the images that were basically inputting into Blender. That's why I'm going to jump to the output tab and make sure that this is 25, 60, which has exact resolution of the images we rendered. That's number one for the frame rate is 24, but we only have 120 frames. We're just basically adjusting all the different settings so that it matches the image sequences we do have. Right now, let's start combining all the different elements together. I'm going to start with the sky and I'm going to hit Shift a to search. And I'm going to look for a node called Alpha over this node right here, the Alpha over node, it will put the image that is in the second socket above the image that is in the first socket. So what we will do, I'm going to take the sky and plug it to the image number one. And I want to put the 2D mountain above it. So I'm going to take image number two, which is the 2D mountains. And let's plug it to image. We're not seeing anything. And the main reason for that is that if you want to preview a node, as you probably remember from the shader editor You need to hit Control Shift and click on it to be able to see it. Right now the image is so huge because that's how weird the viewer in blender works in order to make your image smaller, just hit V to make it smaller. And if you want to make it bigger, you need to hit Alt V. I know it's one of those weird things in Blender there to get to work with it. Maybe move it a little bit up. And also, here's a really handy shortcut. If you hit Control Space bar while you are in a certain editor, e.g. if I am here and I hit Control Space bar, I will maximize it. If I hit e.g. Control Space bar here, I'm going to maximize this editor. I want to maximize the compositor, so we'll make sure your cursor somewhere in the compositor and hit Control Spacebar. And right now we're just seeing our compositor. Let's move this slightly up, something like so. And let's zoom in, zoom out slightly. The really nice thing is that when you zoom in and zoom out, you will only zoom on the nodes, but the Video Preview will always stay the same. So, yeah, this is nice right now, after adding 0, make sure to check his Alpha. After doing this, we need to put the background mountains above the 2D mountains. Select your offer over Shift D to duplicate it. Let's put it here and we want to put the background mountain above it. So let's put it here. Yeah, This is looking good. Shift D one last time. And let's put the foreground mountain and boom, right now we do have our entire scene combined. And the really nice thing right now about this setup is that e.g. if I want to only play a little bit with the settings of the sky. So let's say e.g. I'm just going and don't follow me in this. I'm going to add a curve, Every be curves. If I play right now with the settings of this, I'm only going to affect the sky because the sky and the RGB curve, and then we'll combine it. So as you can see, this will give us huge flexibility later when it comes to changing and combining all the different elements and making them work together. But I'm not going to use this RGB curves, so I'm just going to hit Control X to delete it while you're keeping this really nice link. But yeah, this is how you can combine all the different images you do have right now, let me just hit Control Space bar to minimize the editor and get back to the normal view. And I'm going to slide this to just see how all the different, the different images are looking. And yeah, this is our animation. Now, of course, blender is not able to play this in real time, but yeah, this is our animation. We still have to render layers that we still didn't import, which are the mist and fog, which actually just seeing this right now, I think we may not need them, but, and probably I'm not going to use them for this composite, but I'm just going to show you how you can basically important just in case. So here's what we will do. First of all, let's start with the midst pass. So I'm going to duplicate this 11 last time, basically the foreground mountain. And I'm going to click on this to import the messed click on the first one. Let's move down and let's select miss 2,120 open image. And the thing about if I just hit Control Shift to see the mess, it is not your usual image. We're not going to use the usual way when it comes to counting it because this is black and white, we cannot just put it over. That's why we need to use a custom node which is called a mixed RGB. If I actually, it is just called mix surprise. I'm going to click on Next. I'm going to put it right here. And from the mess, I'm going to plug it to the second socket. Now by default, this mixed node, we'll just put the second socket, which is the messed over the image. And you need to change it from mixed to screen or you can change it to n, the one that works the best I guess. But in our case, I'm actually going to use add and you need to lower probability the factor way, way down. And the really nice thing about the mismatches that it will allow you to add like this, some sort of haze or something like that to the scene. If you want to play a little bit more with it, I'm going to go Shift a and you can add an RGB curves and you can play a little bit more with their settings and all of that until you start getting a look that you are happy with. So yeah, you can definitely use it. Honestly, if I just select all of these and hitting empty mute them, just seeing the results like this, it is already looking good, so probably I will not end up using it. This is for the midst pass lemon. Just make them neater. By doing this. We're actually probably we can delete them, but I'm just going to leave them in the project files so that you can play with them. And also you can add the font. Let's do Shift D to duplicate this one more time. And let's open the fog, fog, 014,100.20, open image, Shift D to duplicate the Alpha over. And let's put it here. And yeah, this is actually looking way better than the best pass. Probably we didn't need to render them as pairs, I guess, but maybe we can use it somehow. Either way. This is for the fog planes, as you can see, if I just select this node and hit m, this is the before, and this is the after, this is before, and this is the after. Here's something that you always need to put in mind. These fog planes, e.g. this gradient that we created and all of that. If I were to do the compositing work, not in Blender, but e.g. in Nuke or individual result, which is by the way free, I will probably not bother even rendering this fog Plains because it is like really easy to replicate this effect just using some basic gradients. Bad because we're inside of a blender and I want to keep everything in Blender. It is not that easy to actually replicate this in the compositor. And that's why basically we're rendering it in the scene. So yeah, other than that, I'm actually also going to select both of these and I'm going to hit mute because there probably will not use them for now. And I'm going to select all of these and let's put them here just in case e.g. in the future, I might need them. Other than that, I'm going to go to File Save, and I'm going to save it in the blender project, I'm going to call it, let's say compositing 01 and hit Save blender file. And yeah, this is how you can combine all the different elements from your render. And in the next video we're going to play a little bit with all of these different elements and just some colors and all of that. And I will see you should be ready to go. So yeah, I will see you in the next video. 22. Compositing Part 2: Hello and welcome to the second part of the compositing video, where we will basically do our real adjustments in the last video, basically just put it all the elements above each other. And in this video we'll start playing a little bit with the colors, with some curves and all of that. And it's going to be really fun. So yeah, let's just do that. Okay, first of all, as usual, I'm going to hit Control Space bar to maximize my editor right here to see basically the full image, let's just move it a little bit up. And yeah, first element I'm going to start playing with is basically the sky. So the way of how I imagined this guy to be is basically, let's say to make it a little bit darker, that's number one. And number two, I'm planning to make it a little bit more contrasty. So my favorite node to start basically adjusting the lighting and all of that is to basically add a node called RGB curve. So I'm going to go Shift a and let's look for RGB curves. Let's put it right here. And the first thing I'm going to create a point right here in the middle. And I'm going to lower this slightly down. And here's an important concept or something that you will find. It always happens. Focus right here, even though I'm moving this line. Notice that also this part is also moving. I guess this is called shouldering or something like that in coloring. I don't know the exact name of this phenomenon. Basically, when you change your curves are no, when you change your curves and also it changes in another area. And this is not what we want. What I want to do is basically to select this point, you will have something called Victor handle. And if I click on it, basically each part right now, we'll move on its own, which is exactly what I want. So here's what I do. I'm going to lower this slightly down to something like so. Basically, I'm somehow clipping like the highlights. And at the same time, I'm going to move this point slightly like this. Oh, no, this is too much. If you want to move a certain point in a really precise value, I would highly recommend that you use this slider right here. And also, this is when quirk in Blender and that I don't know why they don't work on that. Which is that even though note is that like a barely change the position of this point, notice that the drastic effect, even if you do like small changes, tend to have like huge influence on the image. You can not do these granular setting changes without basically just starting to input like really tiny numbers right here. That's why I'm going to get back right here to zero, which is the default value. And let's start increasing these values basically by typing them. So let's do 0.00. No, 0.002. Yeah, Let's try 0.01. Yeah, 0.01 seems to do the job. And if I just select this node and hit m, this is the before, and this is the after, this is the before and this is the after. I'm kinda digging this result. And I can also probably, Let's try 0.02 to make a double. Now, this is too much. Let's try 15 when two. Yeah, I can definitely work with this and it looks decent to be honest. So yeah, this is for the RGB curves. And the other thing I'm going to do is to play a little bit with the hues and maybe lower the saturation a little bit of the sky. So let's go Shift a and let's look for hue and saturation and value. Let's put it here. Basically, the hue will basically change the color of the sky. By default, it will be 0.5. But what I noticed is that when you lower it to something like 0.49, e.g. it tend to get a little bit warmer if I just select this and hit em, is it the before? This is the after, this is before, and this is the after. You can barely probably see their effect. But let's try 0.45. Yeah, this is too much. The 0.49 or 0.48. Yeah. This is, this is nice, like it made this guy is slightly more cyan, which is exactly what I want. And I'm digging this result. Most of compositing honestly is just changing different values slightly until you start getting a result that you're happy with. I'm going to leave it at this for the sky. And right now I'm going to focus a little bit on the 2D Mountain, which is the next element. And just to organize my notary, I'm going to move this here and maybe select all of these nodes. And let's just move them really, really far because you don't need to work on them right now. This here. And let's play a little bit right now with the 2D mountain, which are these mountains that are right here in the background. Okay, First things first, I'm going to start with the same node, which is the RGB curves shift a and let's look for curves. That would be curves. Let's put it here. For this RGB Curves, I'm only going to do one thing, or actually two things. I'm going to start moving this point slightly up, okay, here's one we're thinking that will start to happen. As you can see somehow, the effects that I'm doing right here are also applied on the sky, even though I have the 2D mountains. And then I'm doing the RGB curves, I'm doing the adjustments after the 2D mountain node. So I shouldn't see this effect be applied on here because there is no relation between this RGB curves and the sky. This is also a new thing that you will learn is that you need to check this convert pre-multiplied right here. And if you click on it, boom, right now this RGB curves will only be applied on the 2D mountain. We will need to check this box called convert pre-multiplied for all the alphas over nodes. Either way, I'm going to get back to my RGB curves and I'm going to hit the backspace to reset this node to the default state. Let's create a point in the middle. And I'm going to move this slightly up just to basically make it slightly faded if that even makes sense. Because in general Objects that are already in the background tend to have lower contrast. So just basically some tiny adjustment to get the look we're trying to get. Maybe let's try to move it a little bit more. Know, this is getting too much. Let's do this. Yeah, okay. This is looking good. I wish blender. They can they can change how sensitive, What's this zoom in, okay, there's an option for zooming in and zooming out, but I wish they do give an option for how sensitive this curve is. This is number one. Number two, I want to make it slightly or niche. How can we do that? Well, you can get the red color basically by jumping or actually the orange color by jumping to read, we need to add some red basically by in the shadows, by moving this slightly up. And as you can see, this is way too much. So we need to play a little bit with this hair. So let's try 0.01 is still too much. 0.0 005. Let's try one. Yeah, this is more like it. And also make sure to jump to blue. And we need to move this point to the left or actually to the right to subtract some blue from the shadows to get yellow. So let's go here or no, not that one. This one. And let's try 0.00 10.00 to 0.005. Yeah. This I guess is looking slightly better, more orange-ish. If I deselect this node and this is the before, and this is the after, this is the before. This is the after. And as you can see just by the fact that it is less contrasty is already making that mountain like a. It is actually far in the background. I might even add another hue and saturation known to sell this effect even more, not the brightness and contrast, hue and saturation. I'm going to put it here. Let's make the 0.49 and let's lower the saturation to something like 0.8. And yeah, I'm kinda taking this result honestly, sin is this element technically should be like four in the background. I guess it makes sense if I go Shift a and add a blur node, a blur basically to blur slightly the elements so that we get rid of that CG look, which is really sharp. I'm just going to put here too really tiny value just to sell this effect even more. Other than that, I'm good to go. I basically right now, I just did two elements and still do to go. Let's move this here, or actually let's do this to get really nice looking no tree. Right now I'm going to play a little bit with the background mountain and let's basically check convert, pre-multiply it so that all the settings of the background mountain will only be applied on the background mountain. I'm going to go Shift a and my favorite node, which is the RGB curves. Let's put it here. And from here I'm going to put a point in the middle, something like so let's make sure it is 05. And also here 05 to be perfectly in the middle. And let's select this point right here. And we need to move it something like 0.00, 50.007. And yeah, this is good. There's the before. There's the after. This is before. And this is the after. It is the fact that it is right now less contrasty is already making it look good. Let's jump right now to the red channel. And let's move this e.g. let's say 0.002 to make it a little bit more reddish. There's the before, there's the after. That is nice. And let's also jumped to the blue to add a little bit more blue into it. Let's select this point and let's move it up or something like that too. Okay. There's the before, there's the after before and this is the after. And it is looking slightly weird, I guess. I guess I'm going to leave the blue channel the way it is, so I'm not going to play with the blue channel. The only thing I'm going to do right now is to basically add hue and saturation. Hue saturation, let's put it here, 0.49. And for the saturation, I'm going to lower it to something like 0.9 or 0.95 so that it is slightly more vivid than the 2D mountains that are on the background. So if I select both of these two nodes, hit em. This is before, this is after, this is before. This is the after. I'm digging this result. And right now, let's play on the last element, which is the foreground mountain. Let's organize our node tree. So for this foreground mountain, I'm going to go Shift a and let's look for RGB curves. Let's put it here and let's create a point and the middle, make sure it is 05.05. And I'm going to move this point slightly up to add a little bit of contrast. This is too much. And also I need to check convert pre-multiplied to only, so that will only be applied on the foreground mountain. Let's try it. Really tiny, very like 0.005. So those are the before, there's the after, before and the after. Maybe you can also probably remove some red from the shadows, but you need to move it. No, this will not look good. It's not look good. Maybe let's try to lower the blue to add more yellow. Yeah, and this also won't work. Let's remove it from the highlights. Maybe we're actually removing a little bit of blue from the highlights kinda works. So this is the before and the after. There's the before and this is the after. Maybe let's try add some red to the highlights. This is actually Looking nice. This is looking nice. Let's see. This is the before and this is the after. It is definitely looking better. And the cherry on top, which is the hue and saturation node Shift a. And let's look for hue, saturation and value. Let's put it here and let's adjust e.g. the hue to something like 0.4, 9.4, the saturation maybe you can 0.95 to make it less saturated. And this is the look that we are getting right now. Let's say hypothetically, we want to see the original image. Make sure that you select only the effects. You should not select the Alpha over nodes. Let's sit em. This is the before, there's the after, before, and this is the after. And I guess there's a huge difference between them. This is for the first part which is adjusting the coloring and all of those cells that are related to each element on its own. Right now we are going to do some global adjustments. The global adjustments are basically the things that you will do at the end of your node tree. The first thing I like to do after I finish basically adjusting the coloring and all of those stuff for all the individual elements, I'm going to do, first of all to add another curves, the RGB curves. And basically this is more of a creative thing. You can play with this curve the way you want. And basically what I'm trying to do right now is to nail a certain look that I'm trying to get. So first of all, I'm going to maybe increase a little bit the highlights, maybe create one of those S-curves basically by doing something like so, basically trying to get a look that you're happy with. That's what I'm trying to say. Maybe let's add a little bit of contrast. Now this is too much, even lower, it even more. Let's try really tiny value like 0.00, 10.002. You can probably also, let's say, what if we lower a little bit the red to get more cyan into the short, or let's actually bring it a little bit up and remove a little bit of blue and also move a little bit of green to magenta. Yeah, this is the before, there's the after before and this is the after. You can definitely see like this lighting right now is a little bit way more moody and more pinkish or more orangeish or whatever you call that color. And yeah, I think that this is better. After this, I'm going to add a lens flare. What is a lens flare? It is basically an image that looks basically like this, which we will put on top of the image to add like there is some sort of a sunflower or something like that, if you know what I mean. So this is really easy to add in Blender in the resources folder you will have actually lens flare. So all we have to do is basically to just drag it and put it inside of a blender. And let's put it here. This is our lens flare. And let's add a mixed node Shift a and let's add mix, not the Alpha over, we need to make snowed. Next, let's put it here. We want to put the lens of layer above the image. Right now, it will fill the entire screen. This is not what we want. What we want is basically first of all, to change the operation from Max Mosley, you will find yourself either using ad or you can also use screen. They both would give you a really similar result. I'm going to leave it as screen for now and we need to change its location. To change the location, you will need another node, and this node is gold transform. So go Shift a and let's look for transform. Let's put it here and you will play with the x and y until basically tried to put this sun or this flare somewhere right here. So let's play a little bit with the x. As you can see, I'm moving it. Let's for the location. I'm also probably going to make it a little bit bigger. Let's say 1.2 or let's try 1.31, 0.5. Yeah, this is more like right now because it fills the entire screen and it looks really nice. Honestly, from this factor right here, you can change the intensity of the sun, but honestly, I will probably just leave it at one, so that doesn't look weird. Okay, So this is for the transform. And one important thing right now, because if you remember, this shot is moving. So in case you're just going to render when image, you're good to go. You don't need to do the next step. But in case you also rendered animation, you will need to do this next step. This next step is basically we need to animate the position. Why is that? Because if you remember, our camera is moving. So here's what we will do. I'm going to hit Control Space bar. I'm going to jump to frame number one. So this is where our sun flare is. Maybe let's try to move it. Okay, I need to select the viewer has moved slightly down. Okay, let's get back to our Transform. And I'm going to move slightly too to the right. Okay? And I'm going to with the right mouse button insert keyframe. And with the right mouse button insert keyframe. I'm going to jump to the last frame and I'm going to probably move this somewhere. It will probably disappear behind something like so. And right mouse button and insert keyframe selected both of them, hit D and make sure to change it to linear so that animation doesn't go fast and then slow down and then go fast. This is important because as I mentioned, our camera is moving. So technically also the sun should move with the shot. This should give you some really nice parallax if you know what I mean? The last element I'm going to add, which is a little bit of vignetting, which is also really easy to add. And you will find an image in the resources folder called vignette, which is the picture I'm going to use. Just take it and let's open it inside of Blender. Let's put it here. Let's go Shift a and let's look for mics. Put it here and I'm going to mix it with black. Right now. Everything is black, but I'm going to use this vignette as a mask for this. I'm going to take the Alpha and plug it to the factor and boom, visited before. And this is the after, this is the before and the after. As you can see, we made the edges of this picture slightly darker to basically draw our focus to the most important area of the shot, which is around here. And yeah, if I just hit Control Space bar, this is the shant we do have right now. I'm going to try and select all the different effects that we did so that we can see the image we started with and the images and the image that we will end up with. So let's select all of these right here. Also these, also these, these, these technically right now, if I hit em, I will see the original render without any sort of effect. So this is the before, this is the image was started with, and this is the after as it did before. And this is the after. And you can see how much you can actually push your renders in the compositing stage like this is a huge difference. It is almost doesn't look like it, is it the same shot? And this is just basically by virtue, doing some simple operation like curves and adjusting some colors and hues and all of that here and there until we start getting a result that you're actually happy with. And yeah, this is basically how you do your composite. The last step to basically right now how to render this, because some people might not know how to render this right now out of Blender. Here's what we'll do. First of all, at the end of my node tree, as you can see, there is the Smiths, which are basically the fog pass and the best paths which we didn't use, unfortunately bad. Here's what I will do. I'm going to cut both of these two links and let's connect mixed to the viewer. And these nodes, I'm just going to leave them somewhere like far here in case in the future. Somehow I needed them all. Let's put them right here. I will probably know because they are muted, that I don't need these notes either way. When it comes to rendering, we need to do the same thing that we did before in the, when we were setting up our rendering notary, go Shift a and let's look for a node called file output. Let's put it here and connect the image, which is our last node, basically connected to the final output. Let's make slightly bigger. Hit Enter to open the sidebar. And from node properties right now we are going to adjust the settings of the final render generally because this is the last step when we are going to render, I will highly recommend that you will live with the way it is just render at P&G RGBA doesn't matter, honestly because we don't have an alpha channel, but I'm going to leave it there. And for the compression and all of these settings, just leave them the way they are. The only thing I'm doing, I'm going to change the location to a more suitable folder. So I'm going to jump to the Student Resources and inside of render. And I already rendered this image which has called final render. So just create a folder called final render and you can basically call it e.g. highlights how he lands underscore final. As you can see, this is the Render amusing. So create a folder called a Thailand's final. So I'm going to actually just show you how to do it. Create another folder, e.g. let's call it final shot. Inside this folder, I'm going to call it Thailand's final underscore. Accept Let's call it high lands underscore, final, boom. All you have to do is basically to go to Render and Render Animation. This shouldn't take so much time because blender right now are just rendering an image sequence of images. So it should happen like really fast and a couple of minutes. And I will see you on the other side to show you the last step, which is basically converting it to a video. Once you render is finished, you will have a sequence of images, basically 1-120. And our job right now is basically to convert all of these images into a video. This is really simple. I'm going to also start a flesh blender scene. And right away, right away, just don't choose the template called video editing. From video editing right now you will have a timeline and all that. I'm going to go to Add Image Sequence, navigate to where you saved your render, render, final render, and select all of these images and click on Add Image strip. Right now you will have all of your images right here. The most important thing, we need to adjust our settings, which is 25, 60, so that we will have the same aspect ratio. If you find that your image is slightly smaller than the Video Preview, make sure to select it and go to image. And you will have an option for Apply Scale to Fit. Make sure to check scale to fit and you'll be good to go. Our frame rate is 24, which is exactly what we want. The end is actually we'd only have 120 frames. Let's keep scrolling down. And yeah, this is the most important thing in the output. Make sure to select e.g. in the Student Resources and the render, I'm going to call this high lands underscore final, except make sure it is set to this FFmpeg which has or F, F MPG, or know what they call it, is basically MP4. Make sure you select this option and you're encoding. Make sure it is MPEG4, which is basically MP4. I don't know why they use these complicated names or the video codec. Make sure it is H.264 basically to render it as mp4. And for the medium quality, make sure I always said this to high-quality just to basically squeeze as much as possible of quality out of Blender. And yeah, that's basically it. You don't need to play with any of the other settings. And right away just go to Render, Render Animation. And right now Blender will convert this into an actual video that you can watch and wants you to render is finished. If I just jumped to my folder, you will find technically in the render, you will have final shot, which is your render, which is in the mp4 format as you can see right here. So yeah, that's basically it. Thank you everyone for tuning into this course. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you learned a lot and I will see you in future courses.