How to Create Ghibli Trees in 3D - Blender Tutorial 

Who is this guy, why was he recommended, why is he so good, and why didn't he delete the default cube?

He... didn’t delete the default cube? He’s the Chosen One!

I've never used blender in my life, it's not even installed on my computer. But I watched this whole video and enjoyed it thoroughly

You studied the Ghibli environment. You cracked the secret. And You are showing us that process?! People like you is what makes me love the Blender/3D community. Thank you! Really THANK YOU!

Imagine learning how to spend countless hours on something and just sharing how to do it for everybody else to learn. This man needs more subs.

There are two types of blender users 1 - Obliterate the default cube 2 - Let's subdivide this pretty boi

Great tutorial! The Shader to RGB node is so powerful, I wish there was an alternative node for Cycles! Maybe one day...

2:57 if nothing appears after "particle" object being linked, check if amount value is = 1 in Particle Instance Modifier. It's = 0 by default and that make it shows no results.

This looks like a great way to make some stylized clouds and smoke as well. Thanks! 2 tutorials in 1!

7:19 you can completely proceduralize this step by adding a displace modifier and setting it to either voronoi or clouds edit: make sure the displace modifier is at the top of the modifier stack

23:35 "put negative number, and you can cast shadow with the light" Physics has left the chat...

A few things I discovered while working with this technique. Since the Foliage base object isn't changed when we get to build the trees, you can apply all modifiers, and remesh the object in Sculpt mode (using the pipette to set the detail to what's already there works well). This reduces the amount of polys quite significantly. To use this in a game, you'd naturally want to create a low poly mesh and bake a diffuse texture from the high poly mesh. I managed getting the foliage down to about 2k of polys. Since baking is only done in Cycles, and the Shader to RGB is EEVEE only, bake the diffuse to a texture, and input that texture to the color ramps instead. Gives pretty much the same end result. Also, you can heavily decimate these trees to get pretty cool "low poly" trees! :)

Stylized grass next plzz...that"ll get alotta views for sure because alot of ppl want it and there is no good tutorial on how to do it....dma great job cant wait for dinomancers

Normal person: "Darkness is just the absence of light" Point light with negative power: 27:30

For people using blender 2.9, on the data transfer step around 10:30, the custom normals option is under face corner data

Man, this was the video that actually got me to switch to blender and fully adopt 3d as a hobby. A lot changes in just over a year and a half!

I never thought a tutorial like this was going to exist.

Me : sleep LBS : *Ghibli tree in Blender* My brain : *NO SLEEP FOR TONIGHT!!!*

2 years later, yet this guy is still god. Thank for this amazing work

This is by far one of the best Blender tutorials that I've seen (free or paid for). A+ for innovative use of shaders, instancing, and decimation to keep things snappy. I could have experimented for a year and not come up with this recipe. +1 to many of the other comments too. There are a lot of techniques here that can be broken out and used elsewhere.

It is always so inspiring to see a person with so much shine in the eyes because of enjoying the work.

Didn't think a 30 minute tutorial would take me all day to do, but really shows how much you can learn from a good quality, short tutorial. Thanks so much!!

some number of years into blender and I can finally follow a tutorial and end up with the same result without pausing one million times. You made this tutorial so easy but also so fun to explore different systems in blender. I don't watch as much anime as I used to but so many works by Ghibli mean a lot to people, myself included and being able to emulate that style thanks to you is a crazy feeling I never thought would happen. Cheers. Quick edit to say I also invested in lightning boy recently and if I had to keep one of my addons, that would be it. It literally transformed powerful, but time consuming shading/texturing features into something that feels on par with c4d or maya in terms of quality, style, and ease of use.

I've messed around with Blender some before but every time I've given up on trying to figure it out... I cannot express the pure joy I felt when what happened on my screen looked exactly like what you were showing. This is a fantastic tutorial! Keep it up!!!!

The moment you pressed Smooth Shading it completely blew my mind. This is really good, thank you for these tutorials. This unlocks so many ideas in my head its crazy.

Oh, I have been waiting for this stylised natural assets for a long time. Please keep on making tutorials on natural assets in ghibli style. Huts, rocks, river, mountain, bridge, clouds etc.

Dude, I am experimenting with the final result and... I can't believe blender can do this. It feels so natural, and it has so much language, it really feels like handmade, it has a lot of pression on it. Never thought 3D could do such a thing, I always thought the end result would look or feel synthetic. It's amazing.

In a world, where default cubes never make it past the first 5 minutes. One cube, will become a Ghibli tree. Honestly dude, this is so impressive that you found the best ways to keep the system from slowing down in the process. Not a rookie at all. Got my sub.

as soon as you clicked autosmooth on the normals i was like "yes, this is the excellent content"

Thank you David and LBS we are now one step closer to materialise our Ghibli dreams.

The object color is the single most useful thing I've learned yet from blender! Very cool!

Haven't watched Blender related videos in a while, this came up randomly. Saw the intro and was immediately hooked! Can't wait to see more videos coming out of this channel!

I was literally just trying to make these! Perfect timing! Thank you SO much.

Damn, these are by far the best looking npr trees i've ever seen!

You're a legend, I've always wanted to learn anime stylized 3d art but didn't have the capability to understand the gda talk from arc system works but your easy tutorials are a perfect first step, thank you so much, I don't know how to express my gratitude, but please keep making more videos of. This nature, thank you onec again

You are such a great instructor! I love the way you explain why things should be done not just how. Thank you!

18:23 There's actually an built-in addon "import image as planes" that let's you import reference photos without all the UV fuss

Gorgeous! Love the style and the process.

I know this was posted 2 years ago but the tutorial is amazing, well done and thank you! Also you can literally see the way he is looking at his creation by the end of the video and constantly smiling. :)

I want to thank you for making this tutorial!! Ive been dreading learning Blender for years, every single tutorial I tried I never finish it due to how overwhelming they are. But THIS ONE I FINISHED IT 100% , and I am so proud of myself ;w; THANK YOU

27:55 that is such a great trick and I’m really happy to see you can cast shadow/absorb light now! Might have been in 3DS Max I tried, but remember playing around with this and could not get it working some years ago.

I just want to say that this is amazing. They’re all instances yet you’re able to “change” their material? Witchcraft!

As someone trying to learn and create stylized environments, this was very helpful. I have followed the other videos on your channel as well and had great results. Please keep making more videos! These are very helpful :D

Darn... This method is so awesome, i literally cried when you showed how it looks with the transferred normals. You helped a lot, thank you!

11:15 "it's starting to look like something" Dude, it looks like magic to me

Truly helpful, I'm actually working on a character that needs an afro, and this helped me A LOT! thanks so much for sharing and I can tell, you are good at teaching :D

this is by far the coolest blender tutorial i have ever seen

Brother, I've just started using blender on my ahh laptop watching things here and there and this is BY FAR the best tutorial i've come across. Hands down to you for giving us all of this. New Sub right here

Tutorial is great! Using it for a project for school! Quick tip for ppl stuck at 10:30 please remember to tick that "custom normals" button in data transfer! I was stuck for a bit and went through the tutorial 2 different times before I realized XD

Didn't want to type in "stylised" tree, because you would only get those extremely low-poly tree tutorials. But I also wasn't looking for realistic trees. This is the perfect middle ground. Pretty much exactly what I wanted. And the video is only 5 days old! So had I looked this up a week ago I wouldn't have had any luck! Edit: Would this work in games or would it be too heavy? My pc is kind of lagging already making this XD

Such a great idea, and so well executed. The best things in life are like this tree method: amazing yet simple once you know it, but it takes a frickin' genius to discover it the first time.

My goodness, you have no idea how perfect a time you're posting this vid. Been subbed for months and using your techniques has propelled me so far in stylized 3d scene composition.

Me: "Why am I here" RU-vid: "You keep watching blender stuff" Me: "Ok"

You can get increase the hand painted look by mixing the shader to rgb with a noise in soft light mode. Very nice results, I'll be playing with this style.

The negative value on the point light was the cherry on top to the whole tutorial 👌🏾👌🏾

this is mind blowing! I never even considered that blender could do everything you did like the custom normals

1:27 if duplicating doesn't work when pressing Shift + D, make sure your mouse cursor is in the 3D area next to the ball

That's amazing ! It Reminds me of an old trick for clouds rendering in 3DSmax used in the short film "Paths of Hate". But blender makes it sooo much easier haha. Thx for sharing your R&D ! :)

What excellent work you are doing! Also, you have a very natural way of explaining this kind of tutorial. Well done! Really enjoyed it!

This covered the most topics in a single tutorial ever - you are my favorite RU-vid . Thank you so much!

Amazing. This looks great. What about a tutorial on ground elements like grass and rocks in Ghibli style? Tree trunks in blender would be great too. Thanks.

freaking awesome these "object color" trick to different materials bro! THANK YOU for that bit of wisdom transfer :D

This dude is brilliant and Blender is amazing. I cannot believe that it's creators thought of so many things!

Amazing!! I appreciate your help! Recently I just started playing with blender and looking for toon shader tips. So fun to make Ghibli look style! Thank you so much!

Hey, just a tip. You can enable the images as planes addon in the settings, so you can drag and drop images to blender and they will automatically be set with a image texture. (:

This guy: Studio ghibli: 👀

Right-click.. copy to selected.. You just saved me a ton of time. God bless you

Thank you, this was really helpful! I am a complete beginner at blender, but I could follow along the entire video without any problems at all and I learned a lot! It looks amazing too! :D

As a beginner in Blender (I haven't even finished BlenderGuru's donut tutorial series yet), this was super easy to follow, you definitely earned a sub!! I was wondering, since my laptop seems to be slowing down quite a bit if I have more than 1 tree in my scene, would there be a quick and easy way to temporarily replace these trees or foliages by placeholders (e.g. low-poly spheres)? That'd be very useful in large scenes with many trees, especially if they can be switched with just a few clicks. Update: This was kind of obvious but turning off the particle systems in the viewport already cuts down on a lot of polygons, though the remaining spheres are still relatively high-poly.

I'm using blender 3.4 and can't find the view node used at 12:17 and can't find anything on the internet, can anyone help?

Thank you so much! its about 1 or 2 years ago i saw this video and i could not figure out how to make it properly, this last week i started learning blender by an course,so i sayed: lets start from the beginning. and now after days of learning all i come here on your video and say: thank you! it is a blessing. It is more easy than draw by hand and re-paint all colors, simple copy material and chage color for= green,red,blue,purple,orange,yellow,white,pink and what color else tree is maded of. So Thank you! i cant wait to make it on blender and can export to my game on unreal engine. On 23:41 i got the ''factor'' and made an connection to ''mix- factor'' them i put 0.200 on the below and 0.500 on higher, so i did an better scale of 3 tones

I can't describe how great this tutorial is.

10:50 When it worked on my end, I got lost in thoughts and needed some time before I could continue 😮

Came across this through YT recommendations - really enjoyed this! As a hobbyist game dev would be interested to see how you would export these and get them into an engine like Unity or Godot... Will maybe give it a bash and report back...

Thanks for all the effort you put into this, dude. Very good tutorial.

You are my hero, I wish you all the success in the world, if I had 1% of your knowledge I was already a happy man.

3:00 in when I select my Particle Emitter with the eyedropper the ball just disappears. using Blender 2.91

Hayao Miyazaki: *stares angrily and walks out to puff a cigarette*

I loved this tutorial so much! Is such an ingenious way to make easy beautiful trees, perfect for indie studios. Thanks a lot

Great video. First time watcher. Amazing job.

Great tutorial, I think I being dumb though I dont have 'color' as an option in Object info?

If you're using Blender 2.93, dont forget to change the instance modifier setting to LOCAL rather than WORLD, otherwise your system will be floating away from the object you created.

This was great! i was always scared of touching the shader options in Blender, but you make it sound so simple 😀

This tutorial completely changed the blender npr scene imo Thanks a lot!

3:00 *Can someone help?* My model just turns invisible when i eyedrop the particle emitter to the foliage :( I have tried this twice from scratch, version 2.91.0 (edit): AFTER READING THROUGH NEW COMMENTS I found a fix that helped me: 'check if amount value is = 1 in Particle Instance Modifier. It's = 0 by default and that make it shows no results.'

Great tutorial. I just want to ask: how do you import this object to Unity (with the same look)? Mine looks far less cool : (

I'm two years late but just wanna say that your video is one of the most well explanied tutorials I have come across on yt for blender! :D

I have no idea what kind of black magic did this "custom normal" option but i'm blown away! thank you for this tutorial

Does someone knows the Workflow in Maya 2019.2 to get a similar result? Would be cool if this would work there too. i would actually need it for a school project :D Updated! nvm. did find it by myself xD actually its working with MASH and then convert the Vertex normal in Mesh -> Transfer Attributes and set the Vertex normals on On. after it working with a toon shader oder a rampshader to get a toony look on it :D

I saved my Blender to where it doesn't put in the default cube. I didn't wanna see that disgusting thing.

This is the best recomendation i ever had on youtube, PLEASE continue with this type of content 😘

What a brilliant tutorial and wonderful effect! Thank you.

Wow...great tutorial. You make it so easy to understand and I learned a couple more hot key combos. Great intro to a bunch of advanced concepts. I learned a lot.

Huge thanks for this long format tutorial! LBS add-on is just awesome, btw.

the best tutorial I've seen , I love it!!

I have tried to get into illustration for a decade now. Nothing professional, I am an accountant, just a hobby. For a decade I have struggled and frustrated myself as I just, couldn't get the anatomy to click. In this past few weeks I got into DAZ3D and oh dear god has it helped me a ton. From posing and drawing over, to that I got a super bulky bodybuilder model that i use to reference muscles, things are starting to click now. After such an experience I started wondering what more could be done with 3D to fit in a 2D drawing and I have seen such awesome stuff. This tutorial among many others. It's so cool. It's like... I am actually getting excited to discover what more is out there to do that I could integrate in my 2D drawings. All I need know is to break of this general sense of "you can't do it" and really get into it. Fascinating tutorial. Great work.

Brilliant. 100,000 views in a few days. That shows how many people have been waiting for a solution for the 3d Ghibli Tree Paradox.

This video is one galaxy brain moment after another. It's like watching a wizard at work. I thought I'd seen it all when he did the thing to switch between the colors but when he put a negative value in the light to cast shadow I completely lost it. I can't wait to try the techniques tomorrow. Mad respect.

Absolutely incredible work

love the style. Custom normals transfer is cool as heck. Didn't know where it was going until I saw the result. very nice. The color switch using that color attribute is a neat technique. I did a little research and found that there's also a way to keep the linking but unlink the material only by changing the "type of link" of the material (Data or Object), and maybe some other finagling, to get a unique material (in the case that it's desired to have a totally unrelated material). The way I've heard it with the negative light value is think of it more like a dark hole or something. It's absorbing some or all of the light that passes near it. So, it's not really casting a shadow, but absorbing the light.