Hello everyone and welcome back! Last week I went over some of the basics of Blender, mostly a long list of hotkeys and some basic scene setup. This week I'm going to take the time to flesh out a scene with a few more details and get more accustomed to creating objects in Blender.
As a rough outline, I'll cover a few more hotkeys for this week and then show you how to apply a color palette to your objects. After that I'll dive into building a tree and using that to help flesh out a Cabin by the lake!
Z Pop-up menu for shading/rendering
. Pop-up pivot point menu
Ctrl + 1 Subdivision Modifier, 1 division
Ctrl + 2 Subdivision Modifier, 2 divisions
Ctrl + 3 Subdivision Modifier, 3 divisions
Ctrl + 4 Subdivision Modifier, 4 divisions
Ctrl + 5 Subdivision Modifier, 5 divisions
Ctrl + J join selected meshes
Shift + B Drag box to define new camera focus and camera pivot point
Alt + left mouse on an edge to loop select connected edges
Alt + E Menu for extra extrusion options
First we need a color palette, I'll do this by having a simple 8x8 pixel .png that will contain 64 colors, but thats just my choice. You can have as few or as many colors as you like, although I'd recommend going with the 'less is more' philosophy. 64 will be more than enough for me.
In a pinch You can build a palette in Microsoft Paint or Apple Paintbrush, picking out whatever colors you want. Or lospec.com also has a bunch of palettes you can browse.
Once thats ready, go to the "Shading" tab at the top of Blender. When here you should see two panels, one for Principled DSDF and another for Material Output, they should be linked. If not, hit "new" to create a new material. Then you should drag your color palette file into Blender and it will open its own panel. Left mouse click and drag to link Color to Base Color. Then finally change your color palette option from Linear to Closest. Once thats all done, you can go back to the "UV Editing" tab at the top. Zoom in if you need to and you should see your cube, but flattened out over the color pallete. Select all the vertices of the flattened cube and hit S to scale, hit 0 to scale all the way down to a point. Finally, you can move that point around on the palette to change colors.
Whew, thats alot, so please also check out this video by Imphenzia at the 2min 12sec mark! He's a huge amount of help and the rest of the video is incredible too!
Glowing edges can help us and the user see our low poly models clearer, so lets go ahead and turn them on. Make sure we're in solid render mode, and select the drop down menu. Make sure Texture is selected under Color, this tells the rendered to use the color palette we just implemented. Then select Shadow and Cavity. Under Cavity, select the drop down for "Both" and then set all the values for World Space and Screen Space to their maximum.
I'll start by changing my cube to a dark brown and then select its top face and extrude it E. Repeat this a few times to start a trunk, rotating a scaling things slightly as you go to give it some variety. I want to save some time on my branches, so I'll make a few at once. Turn on proportional editing with O, then Shift and left mouse to select a few faces. Now when I type Alt+E I can bring up a menu giving me extruding options for when I have multiple faces selected. Extrude the individual faces to create branches!
With multiple faces still selected you can bring up a pop up pivot menu with . and choose "Individual Origins". Now we can take our faces and move them around G and scale them S and the faces will be modified based on their own locations as opposed to the overall trees median point.
Add more branches, tweaking as you go. Once you're ready to add some foliage Shift+right mouse to place the 3D cursor where you clicked. Now Shift + A Mesh --> Ico Sphere, to add some poly balls to the scene. Color them and scale them, adding as many as you want to fill out your tree.
Lets add in a flat plane next from the Shift + A menu. This time we want to make sure our plane object is seperate from our collection of tree objects. To seperate out our plane, enter Edit mode and select it, then hit P to bring up the 'seperate' menu. Seperate by selection and type F2 if you want to give it a more descriptive name. Next color it and scale it up so we can have a respectable amount of land to play with below our tree. Next we want to subdivide our plane into more faces so we can manipulate it more. Ctrl + 5 should select the subdivider modifier. Make sure you check the modifier panel on the right and select 'Simple'. Last you need to apply the modifier from the drop down menu.
Now we can add the displace modifier from the list of available modifiers on the modifier tab. Choose "New" to add a new texture and then click the button that appears to the far right of that new Texture. It looks like this:
This will open the texture lab. Choose type to be "Clouds". You can now play with the size and depth values. Also try going back to the modifier tab and changing the strength of your Displace modifier.
In the texture lab you can also expand the colors option and below that check color ramp and open its expanding menu as well. That will give you access to a gradient with two sliders, a black one on the left and a white one on the right. Try dragging these around, they create a floor and/or ceiling to your landscape. I'm going to add a floor with the intent that it'll actually be water up against my rolling hills. When you're happy apply the modifiers.
Next I want to color my water. I'll want to see the model from the side with numpad 3. I'll also use x-ray vision Alt + Z. Then I'll just click and drag to select the bottom of the model. Hold Ctrl and tap numpad - or numpad + to adjust the size of the selection up or down by one. You can also just Shift select or deselect to get all the bottom water tiles. Once you have them, give them an appropriate water color.
Next I want to add the decimate modifier to get back to a more low poly 3d feel. Under the decimate modifier try changing "Ratio" to 0.1. Apply if you like the results. My model is starting to be off in a few ways, my tree isn't sitting on the ground, a few land tiles got colored linke water tiles... So I'll fix those before I move on.
I'm going to turn on ambient occlusion and use an HDRI to bump up my rendering quality real quick. I covered this in week1 if you're curious.
Next I want to try and give my water more reflection. Instead of using the selection methods mentioned above, this time I'll try out typing C. This will bring up the Paint selection tool. Adjust its size scrolling middle mouse, then just paint what you want to select. Once selected, I"ll seperate it out using the P menu. Then right click your water and select "Shade smooth" from the menu. Also, on the material panel to the right, let's change our water's roughness to 0.
... It looks more like shiny plastic, but I'll take it for now. I still have to learn how to make more translucent materials!
Will use Shift + D to duplicate my trees a number of times. For each tree I'll also introduce more randomness by changing their scale and rotation, S and R. I'll also go ahead and Shift + left mouse all the tree objects in the upper right panel. Once selected Ctrl + J to join them all into one object. F2 I'll rename it "Trees".
Some asthetic choices: decided to play around with some of the colors and I also added a new light source. In object Mode, use Shift + A to bring up the add menu, select Light --> Sun. Move it around with G and check out its various properties in the side panel. I suggest a strength of between 2-8 and place it somewhere out around the perimeter or up high above your model (like the Sun...)
All the rest is just a combination of the previous tools and me just playing around. I created a cabin, some stairs, a little dock and boat to go with it. Sprinkled a bunch of bushes around. Decided subdivided trees, earth and water looked good. There is still so much to learn, but I think I'm going to call it for this lesson. Thanks for tagging along!
