Create Winter Scene In Blender

1. Intro: Hi, I'm good this, in this course I will show you how to create a winter scene in Blender. If you have some kind of a scene and blender, but you would like to transform into a winter scene. Feel free to work with bad. And if you don't have anything, don't worry. I will provide you with this scene from our last project. And we will work on that together. At first, we will create the snowing animation. Later on, we will add the snow to be seen. And finally, we will loop animation. So let's keep this intro short and let's jump into the first-class. 2. Preparing the Working File: So this is where we left off last time. And before starting working on this wintery scene, I would like to change visits render engine to EV. And I will go into the render mode. I assume that you have a basic knowledge of the blender. Maybe you are finished the last course vis a vis course where, where we made his house or you have some knowledge of Blender. So I will go a little bit faster in this course compared to the last chorus I made when we created this house. So if it's a little bit too fast for you, you can jump into Maya beginner course, where you will know the basic software blender. Or you can jump into the course where we created with house. And after finishing I ever overdosed course, you should have a good knowledge of Blender and you should be able to follow this chorus easily. 3. Creating Particle System: Let's begin by creating snowing effect particles which will be falling in which looks like a snow. So to do that, we need to create a new object. Let me enable the screencast keys so you will be able to see what I'm doing. So if I press Shift a, you can see what I'm doing. So Shift a and I will add a plane. I will kill that plane. Just something like that. And I will move it above the camera view. So I'll break G and Z. And whoops, G and Z. I will move it to somewhere here. With number 0, I can go into a camera view and I see that I don't see this plane into a camera. That's exactly what I need. I will press member at seven to go into a top view and I'll rotate this Blaine a little bit. I would like this rectangular to fit a camera view better. I don't want to see this angle. So if I press R, I can rotate it and I will write it to something like that. Just basically, I would like to see this rectangular. In this way. I will get back to the camera view by pressing the number 0. I think that works fine. It would be a good idea to apply the scale. So if I press Control a, I get this menu, which properties that I can apply. So I will apply the scale because I scaled this Blaine into the edit mode, into object mode. So I play with scale and MySQL is one. So that's perfect. And if I go to the particle settings, I'll disable this by pressing N. So I will go to particles and I will breath. And as you can see, well already have a particles. Which is easy, right? So this doesn't look like a snow at all. And you probably see one thing, both particles, if it looks like they are jumping. So what's happening? Particles have bear appearing based on the normals. And if we go to the physic settings, no, not physics, to velocity settings in one meter per second. And it goes based on monomials. And if we enable face orientation, you can see that our normals goes to the, how does it, our face is oriented up. So our particles goes up. And then because the physics affecting them, they are gone ven via going down. It might sound tricky if you heard the biz for the first time. But it's not bad, hard. And it's not about important because our particles going down anyway. But I would like to make it properly, and I would like them to go down instantly. So there are two ways how we could do that. We can rotate the plane 180 degrees and then this Blaine normals will go down. Or we can just change this setting and to have m minus one meter per second and the particles will go down anyway. So they are not jumping up and men falling now. It doesn't look like a snow at. All, right, so let's adjust some settings. Let's go to the, for example, physics. What I would like to do, I would like to slow down this falling. It looks like more or like I don't know, maybe like a rain instead of visit misnomers so we can adjust the dam setting. It will slow down their falling because snow is falling quite slowly actually. So something like that would work fine. Varies on ever settings of brownian. And really know Brownian. Yeah, probably brownian. And if we will enable that, most particles wiggling and this looks more like a snow. So that's exactly what we need. Maybe it's a little bit too much of Brownian. I'll reduce it to something like I know h. And that's good. Another thing, both bubbles don't look like us know at all those are halo actually in, if we will, render them, they wouldn't even appear in the render. For example, if I press F2, it will take a second and it renders. And we don't see any particles. What we can do, actually, what we need to do, we need to go to the Render tab and change as Renner as object or collection. But we don't have our snowflake objects. What we can create it very easily. So I will press Shift a, and I will choose the circle as my snowflake. Both snowflakes will be very small and the old ginger vertices to something like eight because we didn't need 30 do Burgesses. I will keep the radius and one meter for now. We will change that a little bit later. And now I will move is on the side by g and x. So I will go into the edit mode by pressing Tab and I will press F to fill. So now we have filled circle which is from eight vertices. It doesn't look like a circle anymore, but that's pain. I will add some kind of a simple materials. So I will go to the Material tab, I will press plus, and I will choose the white color. And why isn't white? It does because this BOD do not have too much lighten. All the lights go here. If I will go to the day light view. Now it has blight, so that's just what we need. We will change the color of this a little bit later when we will add the snow, but for now it will work just like that. Maybe we can go into the Edit mode, go to a face select mode, select this phase breast, each extrude. It, extruded a little bit to have some kind of a weight. And I will press sheets move, I will do that into object mode. And that's basically it. That's gonna be my snowflake. So let's get back to the, to this particle settings. And I will go to a particle settings and in the render section, I will choose the I don't know what to choose because this plane is a little bit hard to find, so I will name it as Snow snowflake, and now it will be easier for me to find it. So I'll add it here. And now if I choose the object, I can choose the object, this snowflake. You can see I have a lot of objects here, but here is the snowflake in, or if it's hard for you to find it, you can just go to this, take this and select the object circle. And it is circle, but it should be snugly. I think I renamed the wrong circle. Meds, our snow flake. And what's that? That's our particle system. Okay, I'll rename it this particle system. Now. It's, it's in the way as it should be. Great. So we have, let's play that animation again. Don't go into it. Render mode. As you can see, our snowflakes are falling, but they look terrible. What I would like to do, I would like to adjust the rotation and I will enable the rotation, will randomize it to something legs to your 0.5. And if we play it again, boom, we have randomized the rotation and every snowflake looks a little bit different, which is cool. That's basically what we need. I see some issues. First of all, vis shadow. I hate it because at the day light, it blocks our sunlight. That's our particle system. And another thing, BOS snowflakes also cast the shadow. I don't know about you, but when I look through a window when it's snowing, I don't really see the shadows. When when it's snowing. Theoretically, it should, snow should guess VSAT a shadow. But they are so small and the various, so many light bounces bad. Usually we don't see the shadow. So I would like to remove those shadows from the, from the particle system and snowflakes. We can easily do that. For example, if I press on my particle system and I will go into shaded mode, I will create a simple material. I want even change anything, but now I have some settings for the shadow mode and I will press none. And that instantly removed the shadow from our scene basically. Yeah. And I will do the same with Snowflake. I don't need to select bosons snowflakes. I will select my appearance snowflake. And we already have a material and the shadow mode, I will press them and both snowflakes one cast the shadow anymore. So that's grades. I will go into the camera view again at 0. And let's see how it looks. It looks quite good, right? It is knowing some snowflakes up falling back good. I think we don't have enough snowflakes in. Our snowflakes are way too big. Both looks like I'll know coins falling from the from this guy. So what we can do, we can see Gilman down first maybe. So I'll select the particle system or I can do it here, or I can just press on here. And I will go to a particle settings. We have viz skills somewhere. Yeah, on the render. So we can reduce the scale of our particles. And we can increase the scale random, randomness a little bit. And let's see how it looks now, it still doesn't look very good. Where is my scale? A trainer and scale? I still would like to remove this. Maybe zeros, 0, 0, 2, something like that. That looks a little bit better. Okay? And I need way more snow. Way more. It's not enough, especially when both snowflakes are so small. So let's go to a particle settings and crank this number to something like 10000. It doesn't change anything because we need to simulate this. So if I go to the start and start playing, now, it's better. Okay. It's knowing, I think it's a little bit too fast. Still. Don't think. So. We don't have this snow feeling. So let's crank that damp a little bit more to some than 0.2. And see how it looks now. Now it looks better, right? But we have an issue. Something happened and the snow disappeared. Just basically from the bottom part. It happened because adverse settings, by default, the lifetime of this snow is only 50 frames. Not the lifetime, honest, No, but basically the lifetime of our simulation. So Elgin went to the 200s. Now with snow is falling and it is it is falling here and even beyond. So that's good. That's what we need. I will go to the render view. And that looks quite good. Okay, that's, that's awesome. We will change with no material materials. And a little bit later, that looks a little bit different in the when I'm playing and when I finished because at the Render Settings, we have Render Settings here. We have view board denoising. I will, I will disable this. We have a better view and it won't be very different when we blink their animation And when we stop. So it looks like that. And maybe we can create the snow for four-bit scene. And then we will have a better idea how the scene looks in general, because now snow looks quite good. I think that's fine. Maybe it can be a little bit slower, but that's fine. 4. Add Snow: Now I would like to add this node to our scene because it doesn't look like window at all. And we can do that in many ways. But I found one very, very easy and cool way. Blender has a Ghoul add on it called Like no or something like that. We can go to the preferences, to the add-ons and search for this. No, real snow, that's the name of the atom. We can just enable it by clicking this and this atom is live. You can see that we can find it in view 3D properties panel. So it is going to be here. We can open this by pressing this or as you know, or we can press N and it will openness. And real snow add on is here. And as you can see, it's very simple. Simple, and easy to use. It, yes, only free settings, the coverage bit height of snow and the selected faces. So that's basically really straightforward. Coverage is basically the coverage of this scene. For example. It will add with snow on the faces bad you selected, and on the faces Bad have normals facing up. So for example, if I will select the bench, it will add the snow on both parts, but not on both parts because both are facing to the side. And in reality, the snow won't appear on, on, on, on the sides. So we can just quickly add the snow in. You will see how it looks. Yeah, so it added with no here, here. Some, I don't know the algorithm on this. It added on top, but it doesn't add it on myocytes. So I will press control Z and disable that. We have a lot of objects. And this snow, I'll end with snowing in on the bench. This, if I will select with snow, you can see that it's quite a lot of extra mesh. And we add this no, on all of the scene. It will slow down our project quite a lot. I think we need to be a little bit selective on, on what we would like to add the snow a little bit more about VO setting. Let's add the snow here. A 100 percent coverage looks like this. That's a big object. It will take awhile to add vis snow, but so that's why I am not going to add the snow on on this big, big face on, on the ground. Basically, I will add just no material. And as you can see, it takes awhile to do with snow on this. So as you can see, that's our 30s centimeters of a hide Visine of the snow and the full coverage, a 100 percent coverage. It looks like that. It just covers everything with the snow. And that's really cool. I will get back my quantile z and I will remove the coverage to some delay, 50 percent will snow again, and you will see how it looks. It takes a while to add it. So I will fast-forward this part. So you see that at 50 percent it added with snow and left some parts without the snow. That looks like that. The height settings, It's also really straightforward. Now we added the 30 centimeters of snow and we'll remove snow and we'll add a 100 percent of coverage. And I will add something low point when 1.5 meters of snow. So let's add it to the same plane, and let's just add it. And you will see how it doesn't lead me to add more than one meter, a 100. That's good to know. So now we have most known jazz basically. More items in my scene. Just drowning in the snow. So, yeah, that's the basic idea of 0 settings. And for example, I will get back to 013 and for example, selected faces. It works like mad if I press this and I will get to a select mode. That's not the best example. And we'll get, I'll create a new blame. I'll move it to somewhere here. Scale up. I'll go to this mode, and we'll go to the Edit mode. Select this and edit mode. And I will subdivide it. Just to me like Matt will select circle, go to a select circle mode, and I will select, for example, this part. And this part. I need to press Shift to keep the selection. Yeah. I don't know how I forget this. And if I will, and if I go to the object mode without deselecting this, I can press elected phases, add snow, and it will add the snow. Most part was that isolate. So that's the basic workflow. With this add-on. I will delete this scene that we created. I'll get back to the render mode. And now you have the basic knowledge on how this atom works. You can adjust it to your skin or you can adjust division, but we are working on so let's add vis snow to our scene. What I'm going to do, I O nlogn to select all, and I will add this node to all the parts beds. I want him snow, but I don't want to select all the parts, for example, I don't want to select miss. So I'll go and I will deselect the selection option. And that's sounds very strangely, but yeah, I will deselect the selection option. If you don't have this, you can go to the filter and you see that you can enable some, some tools, basically toggles. Toggles, that's the world. So if you see it like that, you can go here and select this. And you see this option where you can deselect selection, toggle. You get very idea. So I will deselect, listen. For example, if I press a, it selects everything in between except this. So I would like to deselect this and probably my snowflake. I don't want to end with snow on that camera is okay. It does not going to add with snow on the lamps. So if I press a, it selects all. And I think that's good. I just deselected both couple objects. And I will add basically be default settings to my scene. So coverage at a 100 percent and the height that's fairly centimeters, and we will see how it looks. So let's add this NO, won't run by them at snow. It might take a while to add with snow or maybe not. I know. That's very weird. It added a lot of snow balls, but nothing appeared on my scene, only on the bench. That's very, very strange. I'll delete everything, select objects, the leads. I will delete this. So I had some problems with adding the snow and I couldn't figure out what's wrong pots for some time. I only had with snow on the bench for some reason. And the reason why it happened because I'm stupid. I skipped gets this selected face option and I forgot to deselect it. I even started to google about the bugs of this atom and an impound anybody. Reason it's death. Mi. So before if you want to add some snow to the your wall scene, you need to deselect select basis unless you want to add snow onset and faces, which is another story. So let's select all and press Add snow. It will take awhile. It takes me something like 20 thirty-seconds for my machine to my computer to add with snow. Because it has quite a lot of geometry in my scene for simply assumes it adds no way easier and faster. But here it takes. We will see how it takes. I'm not going to cut that part out. I know it's a little bit boring, but I know it takes them a hormone. How much time? I think it is counted first, vertices, seconds already or something like that. I don't really know. But it should add the snow. So I really don't know ONE on what a bend with timing of those calculations on breast processor on ramps of your computer are just had to either know. The rendering time mostly depends on your GPU. And most calculations. I'm not really sure. I need to Google it. Yeah, so it added with snow. Let's see how it looks. I'll deselect everything and that looks really good. I think I really like how this add-on works. And in camera view, it looks good. That looks really good. A couple of things. Before we move on, you can adjust with snow. At least you can remove us know a little bit. We go to, if we select this, if we go to the edit mode by pressing Tab, we, you can see that we have is geometry, box-like mode. We have this geometry. And in my case, for example, I really don't like this bump here on the window. So you can select it like that. Or you can hover your mouse on top and press L. It will select the mesh which is separated from the other image, but it's in the same mesh category. Island, just do you know if you have this separate mesh? You can press L. It will select, it will add up. So if you want to select 12 or you can, you see what, how it's gone and press Delete and on faces and it will delete. So I'll delete with two. I fought about removing voce, extra geometry, this extra geometry from from behind the building, which we don't see, but I think we can keep it this way. If it slows down your machine by a lot, you can remove it. Feel free to do that. But I will leave it as it does. And I think I will keep all the geometry like bats. That's really cool. Okay, so I will save my file and yeah, let's jump to an adolescent. 5. Reusing Snow Materials: So yeah, I mentioned you that island want to add this snow to do his grounds. Ground Plane. Basically, I can enable selection again to this ground plane and bad because it would slow down my rendering times and basically viewport. So I was planning to add with no material for this ground because I wanted to add the snow for all the scene, then that's not that hard to do because this real snow add on gives us the material and really nice material. For example, if you would go to the shading, you can see when I select this and we have this snow 70 6 material and it looks kind of complex. It's not bath complex, but it's not just basic principle. Be SDF. I'm not gonna explain the shaders in this course. I'm planning to do another course, but we basically get this material for free and we can use it on our image geometry, for example, on our snowflakes. We can change my material to Rails, know what Uriel, and that would be better I think when just basic wide principle be BRDF. And we can change that to our ground material. So let's do that first. So we can go to this materials down, we can add a material and we can choose any of this no materials. I'll choose the snows 0 to one. And nothing happens because it uses the background material first. But if I will remove this background material, it will add the snow material. I don't wanna do that. I will get back because I would like to get back to his background material a little bit later. I need to assign this no material. So I will tap into the edit mode, select all, and I will assign this material. This way. I will keep my background material and I will have this snow material. And as you can see, this looks very different from this material, right? It's grungy, it's huge, and it doesn't look like a snow even from far away. That happened because, because we forgot to apply the skill to our ground when we created it. If we go to the item, you can see that my scale of the ground is 9. It should be one. And then we want to have the problems like Mad Max, Why? I'm accent all the time battery, you need to apply the scale. We can do this easily by Shift a and scale. And you see now our scale is one because before hour, before our snow material was also scaled by also 10 times. And now it looks way, way better. It looks the same like misnomer that we added here. But by making discourse, I figure out that my background looks better when it is bluish. So I will get back to this one. Well, I'll get back to this one. And I think it looks better than men, bad snowy background. But we can add this snow material to our snowflakes because now it's not very good. It's not perfect. So we can select this. I will go into the shading. Tab, will select this and non-white icon selected because because I deselect the selection tool. So where is our snowflake? Here it is. And now I can select it. And I can change this Jew, any of this no materials. Let's select list and you can see my snowflake looks like that. Now my snowflakes also have the same material as the snow in Messina. So that's really good. The one problem is bad. Let's simulate this. Once again. We want problem. At least it should be that it casts a shadow on my scene. But as a C, It didn't know why. But still, I will change the mode to none. 6. Loop Animation: It looks like we created everything we need for this scene. So now what we need to do, we need to loop this animation because I want to have a looped animation. So let's go to our particle system. We can select it here, or we can enable selection and selected here. And annelids go to the particles settings. To loop animation, we need to have the same scene and reframe 0 and add frame 200. If most frames will be the same. We can save it. Our animation is looped. But clearly now they have very different frame. 0 is completely empty and the frame to a 100 is full of snowflakes. So what we need to do, we need to create an alpha particle system to move it backwards and to move existing political system to move it forward. And for example, I can duplicate this particle system by pressing this. And here you can see duplicate particle system. And voila, I have a nanoparticle system which have the same settings as the first one. You can see this number two and it shows bad both particles settings I used into political systems in Busan this, so we can press this. And now we have separate particles settings for every particle system. Why we need bed, okay, I'll delete this one and make another duplicate. So now we have political sets, things in both of those. And for example, if I want to move this to frame minus 100, because I will need to move one of my particle systems backwards and another one's for another one forward. This one also moves backwards. So we don't need that. We need the separate particle systems. So we'll brevis. And now most political systems has their own settings which are exactly the same at the moment. And for example, for this one, I would like to start at the frame minus one and 100 and, and at the frame 100. And this one. Why it's so slow. I would like to start at the frame 100 and reframe 300. You probably see what I did. The first particle system started in here and ends here at frame 0. It will have the frame 100th of a particle system. And this, the second particle system. It starts here and ends adhere. And at this point it will have a frame 100, which is exactly the same as the first particle system frame 100 here. And it should look, that's the idea behind. So that's great. But I made a test and it didn't look for me and I didn't understand what's wrong. But it seems bad. Week rate of both particles systems. And we added Brownian, this forest, which moves the snowflakes and make them more natural and make them more similar to a snow. So I would like to remove that to be sure that both will be exactly the same. And we'll remove the second particle system again. I will make the settings that I want and then we will move to duplicating that. So I will make Brownian 0. And let's see how it looks. With snow is falling but it's not moving as we weren't even to to move, right? It's, it's, it's, it's not very interesting. Luckily, the blender has more than one way to create something. So instead of Brownian, we can add the force, so Shift a and you can see force fields. And we need to add turbulence. Turbulence is here so we can press. G, z and move it somewhere around here. So that's great. Let's see how it looks. We need more power for turbulence. So let's go to the terminal and settings and just increase with trend to maybe 20. Let's see how it looks on 20. Now it's moving and that's exactly what they need. Awesome. At the end of the animation, I don't want to see the particle system one. For example, if my particle system one will be still visible at the frame 200, it doesn't look like it has looped because my frame 200 one be the same as the frame 0. Now, my particle system is still visible as the frame 200 because I don't have a second packet particle system. If I go to verb particle settings, I have only one which starts at minus 100. So we have couple options. What we can do to fix that. We can move the plane which emits particles way down and to reduce the distance between the plane and the ground. And hopefully that would fix this problem because snowflakes would have the shorter distance to move to the ground, but it has their own problems. If I move it down, it will block the light and I don't have much space before it gets into the camera view. So unalike this option, another option is to increase the speed of a snowflakes. Again, if I will increase this beautiful snowflakes, it won't look like a snowflake. It will look more like a rain. I even would like to reduce the speed even more snowflakes actually. So that's not a good option. Another option which we will use, we can increase the length of animation. For example, instead of having 200 frames, we can increase to 300 frames. In VAD should fix the problem. In 300 frames. Our snowflakes should fall down and the global over ground. So let's try this and let's go from Doc sheet to the timeline. And here we have a settings of the end of the timely. So let's set then do 300, and now we will have enemies feed 300 frames. Let's play it and let's see when it ends. So we still have some snowflakes. And at frame, this frame, we still have some. But at the end, I'll deselect both and it's empty. It's very good. So now we fixed all the problems which didn't allow us do loop this animation. Let's duplicate this particle system now. I think we are ready and we can even not weekend. We need to change the frame, start to a minus 150, and it will end at 150. Now we have a longer animation and the lifetime of a particle system will be 300 frames. Also, if you tired of moving this to the beginning and really simulating, there is an option, too big van animation. If we present bake, it will simulate. And for example, a can move to any keyframe I want. And I can see how this animation looks like. Again, I see a problem because at frame 300, our animation is still life, and that's not good. I will unbaked, delete for bake. And I will need to increase the speed of the snowflakes verus no other way around. We can increase the animation to 400 frames or even longer, but let's increase the speed a little bit. So to increase the speed, we will reduce the dam option to maybe 214. Is that going to be enough? I will make VAT again. It's easier for me when men starting with simulation. No, it's not enough. Why is bad? It's very strange. We still have some snowflakes flying round. Okay. Delete Rubik, decrease even more. And let's bake again. Now. It's okay. Let's see how this beat looks like. It's a little bit fast, but it's reasonably okay. If you want to slow down most snowflakes, you will need to increase the length of animation, but I will keep that at 300 frames. It's working as we want. Let's duplicate this. I have an alpha particle system. Remember, we need to separate settings. So I press this and let's start with frame at 150. Let's end the frame, add 450. And lifetime will be 300. Okay, lads bake this one too. And let's see how our animation looks like. This. It shouldn't be like that, okay, it doesn't work. Delete the big lead to bake again. Maybe it's some bug. Now it's working. Yeah. There was some kind of public ledger, something like bad. So let's test this. Let's go to frame 0. I will snippet, and I will go to a frame 300. Most should be the same. Okay, can I have 300? And here, whereas my snippet tool, and let's see if that looks the same. It looks like this is exactly the same. And we successfully looped our animation. So that's really it. 7. Fix Bugs & Render: So basically we finished, our scene. Looks good. I know we have some bugs. For example, this shadow, it should emit, be, fair. This Blaine casts a shadow when when the sun goes from, from that side. So we can easily remove that. If you remember, in Evie, we go to the Material tabs and on the material bad is active and change the shadow mode from them, from opaque to man and wet fix it. With this plane. We did that. We removed the shadow earlier. But if you didn't, you can change it here. That works perfectly in EV, but in cycles, this method isn't working. So let's go to the cycles or disabled denoise. So in cycles, we still have shadow from this plane and from this land. So that's not good in shadows. We can remove it a little bit differently. We can go to the width property tab and go to the shading. No, No cheating. Visibility and re visibility. And we can disable shadow. It is easy, but it is a little bit hidden. We can do the same with this plane. Let's disable the shadow. And if you will render animation in, in cycles, matt will work now. And rendering settings are the same like in the last project. So if you want to learn more, I wanted to keep this video short so you can check in to is an immediate buildings in lender. Here is very enduring settings in EV, and here is very links, settings and cycles. So you can jump into the previous course and land on all, all of these things. So I will render this and I will show you the results in EV n cycles. 8. Thank you!: Congratulations for each in-band of the scores. I hope you liked the scores and if you created something interesting, some kind of window animation on winter scene, feel free to share that on the student's projects here on Skillshare. If you shared your still or animation on social media, feel free to tag me as bill. Gee, I really like to see my students work online. Once again, congratulations, and see you in the next course.