⇨ Download the project files here (click on RU-vid tutorials & Project Files): cgboost.com/resources ⇨ Check out Martin's "Master 3D Environments in Blender" course here: www.cgboost.com/courses/master-3d-environments-in-blender
Hello! Wanted to say thanks so much for making this tutorial. 🙏🏻 I have a question… I’m having an issue with rendering the material index. For some reason the tree is coming out as all white and the background black. Where I see your renders are more black around the leaves and then brighter at the center of the tree. Any idea why this is happening. I do want to mention that I am using a Botaniq tree that has multiple materials for both the bark and leaves. However I have turned the Leaves material to 2 for index pass, and the bark materials to 1, as instructed.
@@EmaSans-tu5eg So I went ahead and took the albeto map into photoshop and tried creating my own mask image. The result came out pretty decent. From what I understand I don’t think the mask is super important. If you can’t figure it out, you’d probably be ok with just using the black and white image. Hope that helps. 🤙🏻
Love this tutorial but I just wanted to mention that for the constraints you don't have to add a 'track' and a 'limit rotation', you can simply use a 'Locked Track' constraint. Set the Z as the locked Axis and the Y as the direction.
Seriously, a fantastic tutorial. I'm not familiar with your channel, but the pink highlights on the settings you're adjusting make it so easy to follow without having to pause. And in addition providing the assets / sprites is icing on the cake. Mad respect, subbed.
Fantastic tutorial, thank you, it works so well! To make it even more efficient I set up the Material/Pass index at the start and then saved the mask and the colour file without having to re-render. For colour variations I found it simpler to connect the random output of Object Info to a Hue or Brightness input between colour and Principled BSDF and use a Map Range to control variations.
I was having some trouble getting the normals to behave in version 4.0 and discovered this is because they changed the Normal Map node's strength calculation, I needed to turn it way down compared to this video in order for it to appear correct. Just an FYI for anyone else following along in newer Blender versions.
I think it would be great to go over how powerful instancing is. I scatter hundreds of thousands of assets, each w/ hundreds of thousands of polygons, it's something not many people really know the utility of
Now i need to learn how to embed that into procedurally generated maps and control it programmatically inside Blender. Thanks for sharing, nice pace and quality content - instant like and subscribe!
Cool, I'll have to test it, but with initial renders done with sky texture lighting. You seem to correct with curves what's essentially too dark render, and in large scenery trees still stand out from scenery as illuminated with downlight.
Great tutorial and nice refinements since the older one. Tho imo in your example scenes some trees are way too close to the camera, it's quite obvious they're planes and it feels cheap. This should be used only for background trees.
2-3 weeks ago I leaned about Maya Mesh tool and how to use it to create a realistic forest. Today YT recommended this video (looks like have to install Blender), to be honest Maya's forest was looking more realistic then this, but considering these are just png image it's looks pretty nice.
The results are very cool. I am starting to use image planes myself on everything I can . You do take this to a new level I have not tried . Thanks for the share. :O)
9:29 i dont think you need two normal maps for this. you could bake object space normal maps which will fully preserve all the directional information for you. bump maps work too
The overall normal adds plasticity to the whole model, making it feel like the treetop is more spherical, while the specific tree normal map adds plasticity to the leaves and trunk.
There is no paid addon in this vid lmao, in fact that tutorial is the process to recreate the same effect as "Alphatrees", a paid addon, for free :')))))))
Nice tutorial! Tree shadow is missing. And constaints now can be copied without Addon, by select all (last one with constraints to copy) then Object -> Constraints -> Copy Constraints to Selected Objects
Got a question about the advertised course. Are the mountains shown here created using imported heightmaps or will the course cover how to create mountains based on more specific requirements or visions ?
Hi is there any way to use this approach on something like *the fantasy tree generator* addon (that has an animated wind and particle system), what I'm trying to mean is that can we just create 2D gifs/image sequences that have transparency and all other kinds of stuff in this video to create huge, massive environments that have a bunch of animated (at least in terms of wind animation) trees?
@@kuhanesh Thank you but unfortunately not. That is where my mind first jumped to as well but due to my workflow using different view layers it affects other renders as well. Thank you though!
Can this be done but with grass? Knowing that normally the camera is more looking down. I want to create very big grass fields, and this method would save a lot of memory.
can you create a series for understanding nodes?? plz its very difficult to understand how nodes work and how to use nodes to to create different kind of things. plz make
Not sure if this will work but here's a suggestion: When creating the initial trees, animate it there. Then render as individual frames. When importing it using 'import images as planes', you can set it so it uses the whole sequence and will therefore animate it while using the same node setup
@@kuhanesh Ah, so its kinda like a blitter, letting use the particle like a video-buffer change the quasi-frame-content, cmp. RotoScope/AniGif/MNG or classic layered Multi-Sprites in 8/16-bit-hardware. I really have to dig into the possibilities step by step and play with it, this will be fun. Thanks!
I wonder what if this method mix with a 360° image sequences and these 360° texture will be show base on the view angle😬❓ isn't it completely look like a real 3d object?
Use impostors in your trees, this a evolution of your billboards.. similar but yo have the posiblity use the camera in extrem planes no breaking the fake foliage. You must learn this technics. Your system I used 25 years ago. Anyway I follow using in composting this alpha layers but combining with impostors. I understand that for younger people everything is incredible amd new. Nice content guy.
@@ovrava i use them because i made a lot tree asset but disabled wind animations... until get fixed=never.... the nanite is good when u make a dense forest. its mean about +20fps with nanite compared ot hism. even a grass have better performance with nanite.
The only problem I had was - the material index settings didn't work well. I got a mask with the leaves being white and the trunk being a slightly darker grey. So the mask wasn't helpful later on. Is there a better way of doing this? I double checked and they use completely different materials.
this is a very good tutorial, I have a large scene with a lots of threes in there, but can you please tell me, I will need a camera from top, and I guess this method can't work in that case
a t on avis je pourrais me servir de cet technique pour rentrer mes arbres dans une map que je fais pour beamng je dois exporter en collada pour etre lu dans le jeu
its weird to see nowaday films are using real high textured 3d object for cgi background, kinda wasting time of rendering and money which is have 11,12 result
Siempre me pregunto porque la gente piensa que las iglesias y la fe se acabarán si se revela que existen razas aliens. He sido un cristiano por 20 años. Eso fue después de avistar un ovni. Me satisface saber que Dios ha creado un vasto universo. 😊Mi fe se refuerza con lo sobrenatural en nuestra realidad.
Too technical, its good for someone like me who is experienced with blender but for a new guy, all they hear is : "Do this, than set this, than move this" , no explanation as to why and what each button does. 5:24 - You are saving your fake normals with color management applied as well as not saving the image as non colored data / raw (Meaning all the values are wrong there, tbh, i don't know what color management you are even using, you don't show us) and then later you are reading your normal maps as "non color data" which is correct if the image was SAVED as non colored data and it wasn't, you need to further educate yourself on color spaces, all your normal data got shifted in value here, the normals are wrong. Side note : 3:51 if you can avoid using colored lights (Non grayscale lights), avoid them and stick to grayscale lights, at least until spectral renderer will be a thing, the reason is, color lights aren't calculated correctly , its the way the renderer is currently built (sources : color management and spectral renderer topics on devtalk blender), that lack of knowledge is why you had to use a 15,000 watts light there. if you do use colored lights, know it will not be visually accurate. Please note folks, What is presented here is a very VERY HACKED method of baking stuff and the illusion will quickly break if you move around the trees (Obviously, its 2D planes at the end), mind it but for the video purposes, ITS GOOD but with some critical mistakes listed above.
Regarding your first point, a "new guy" is generally not meant to learn about large scale optimisation. Chances are high that someone looking specifically for this already has some knowledge of blender or 3D in general.
I don't think your comments were very helpful to anyone. Do you have a better method of using 2D planes in a large scene that covers say half a mile or more? Link here if you do. I'd like see it. My guess is.... you don't.
@@Illasera On the contrary, I have a degree in computer science and have extensive research in Christianity and atheism. I dare say I have spent more time thinking than you have been on planet Earth. Your insult reply pretty much shows you have zilch to offer because I asked you to supply a BETTER SOLUTION than the one in this video and you provided.... zilch. Why didn't you tell people to avoid 3D rendering altogether because the results aren't 100% photorealistic? Once again, where are YOUR tutorials? Do you have any scenes/animations of large forests to show and how you accomplished them in Blender? No, all you have is a bunch of harsh criticisms of someone who is sharing - for free - their knowledge.
Please may I ask, when rendering the normal, why did you use the render in viewport option as opposed to using the normal pass like you did the material index?
Would really like to see you do a comparison where you compare the render time with these scattered planes vs scattered full polygon trees. Because Cycles actually prefer render lots of polygons instead of lots and lots of alphas, with the bonus that the polygon trees will look quite a lot better :)
If I had to just guess, I would say that rendering a 4-vertex plane with 512 pixels of resolution would be way, way, way faster than rendering a tree with 200,000 polygons. So, it wouldn't matter if you had 10 trees or 10 million. It seems clear that rendering light on a 512 pixel plane would be faster than trying to render most any normal poly-based tree. No? If rendering a polygon tree was faster, Martin wouldn't be going to these lengths to create trees like this to scatter across a HUGE area of land. You can make one tree like this and one just polygons and test it yourself on your machine and time it. See which one renders fastest. I'm going to bet the image planes render faster. If you are adding 10 or 11 trees to a small scene, then this method probably is a waste since you can just add 3 or 4 trees, instance some and use high poly trees. Just how I see it.
@@TruthSurgeI have rendered scenes with maybe a million scattered trees with around 70k polygons each and it was just fine, Cycles really eats polygons. It really doesn't care, instead what takes time is to calculate what the rays are doing. So something that Cycles doesn't like is calculating if a rays should go through an alpha or not, and the denser the forest gets the more transparency ray bounces you need to not get pure black so the render times just goes up. I did a test a couple of years ago where I rendered some scattered grass, one where the grass was a simple plane and a alpha, and one with modelled (and subdivided) grass with a few thousand polygons, and the polygon one did look significantly better render while also rendering in about half the time as the alpha one. I'm gonna do a similar test again soon to see if the difference is the same, but I doubt I'll see any big differences from before :) Having that said, if you're rendering in Eevee it's a whole different story, there the planes with alphas will win big time!
@gurratell7326 compare apples to apples. Put same numbers out and use same settings. So I'm no expert but this alpha plane idea is probably easier on viewport but I haven't tried a scientif8c comparison. Maybe one day I will.
@@TruthSurge Yes, the settings are the same, just that it's high poly objects that are being instanced instead of alpha planes. Of course the viewport would be very heavy showing billions of polygons, but you can set those objects to show only the bounding boxes, no problem :)
Oh its Martin again! I watched and commented on your amazing showreel you released a day ago! I didn't know you were with CG Boost this is amazing. What a legend keep up the amazing work!
To be honest, these days it doesn't make much sense to render forests as 2D cards. In fact, quite the opposite, the best way to render forest these days is using tree models with geometric leaves instead of opacity mapped leaves (within reason of course, VRAM is still a constraint). But one of the most expensive effects for path tracers, such as Cycles, is opacity mapped geometry traversal. Tree cards in sufficient resolution with complete texture set don't save that much memory compared to high res tree mesh with about 12 triangles per leaf, assuming the trees are properly instances. The performance of real geometry without opacity mapping is expected to be equal, if not better, because the ray doesn't have to traverse multiple triangles and test for opacity map on each. I'd just avoid tree meshes with opacity mapped leaves. They are the worst of both words. You get still get the opacity traversal performance drop but you don't save the bit of memory you'd save with cards. Bottom line is that unless you have really low VRAM amount (4GB or less), just use one, or at most two tree meshes with lowpoly leaves that are cut along their silhouette and don't use opacity map, and then randomize rotation, scale and shader parameters of the tree instances. You will get a forest that takes only little bit more of memory, looks miles better and renders about as fast.
