Creating an Epic Kingdom - Blender Tutorial

[@noelhutz]

Polyfjord and Covingsworth uploading on the same day??? What a day

[@fishydoesart]

And Southern Shotty too.

[@bitchio]

Ha it is a good day!

[@marlonabbas8171]

Not really, you can do some amazing stuff with BLENDER 3D with pretty mid gear, unless you wanna make ultra realistic stuff and use more demanding software like houdini or UE5

[@noelhutz]

@@marlonabbas8171 I think you've responded to the wrong comment my man lol

[@faizahmohammedaruwa]

Polyfjord uploaded!? **Checks as see tutorial for the bouncing cord visualizer is up** EXCUSE ME!!! 🏃🏽‍♀️💨

[@sirdiff1]

As usual, very nice work. One side note I would like to add for people getting into environments: do not underestimate compositing. While doing everything in render is nice and easy to grasp, there is a reason why most professionals output different layers to be manipulated in compositing later. Not only it gives you more control even after you are done rendering, but for stuff like the atmospheric fog it's often preferred to just render without it (which can drastically reduce render times) and then apply it in comp from a depth pass that costs nothing to render. You could be wasting hours of machine time and electricity. With that said, I understand that for a beginners tutorial its already enough information to absorb, so its probably best to leave it for more advanced ones.

[@angelillomadness844]

Thanks to render in layers and compositor work after I was able to render scenes with huge count of polygons and textures up to 4k. Take less time and as you said more efficient and less time and power consuming.

[@MK_Grafik]

I've found that, painfully, Volumetrics often do give better results than depth or mist passes, but I do agree. Split the scene into three layers, and then composite in Nuke, AE, Fusion or even Blender, whatever you prefer. Especially if you are struggling for VRAM or viewport performance, it helps so, so much and gives you better control over the scene in post.

[@sirdiff1]

@@MK_Grafik yes, just a single depth pass in a color correct usually doesn't cut it, but you also layer in some extra fog/cloud passes in 2.5D comp and 90% of the times it comes out better than just a cube with a volume in render. I have seen shit renders turn into beautiful scenes just thanks to a couple comp tricks and a bit of matte painting

[@MustafaSE]

ARE THERE ANY VIDEOS OR ARTICLES YOU CAN SUGGEST ABOUT THESE?

[@sirdiff1]

@@MustafaSE if you want to learn more about the possibilities of high level pro compositing i would recommend Hugo's desk on youtube, you can grab a free Nuke non commercial license and get started with his beginners series. With that said, for a comprehensive course on professional tools for making environments from start to finish I would recommend Rebelway's Houdini Environment course where they also go over nuke/da vinci fusion, but it uses completely different tools and is is a paid course. You can obviously find it through "less than legal" ways though, even though I wont recommend it here it for obvious reasons. If you want more beginner friendly and Blender oriented stuff, there is a nice video from Robin Squares on youtube who goes over render layers and how they are used in comp withouth any external software, I would start from there.

[@diiphamba84]

If you already have a course from Covingsworth, you will know to achieve this massive quality, he has lots of steps to analyze and conceptualize the scene. I mean most of learning people forget about these steps and this guy really bring me a lot of knowledge and inspiration. Thanks man!

[@Covingsworth]

Thanks that’s really kind. I’m so glad you’re learning from these 😄😄

[@zed2929]

Cannot somehow underappreciate your job in helping others with their struggles in 3d. I guess most of os sometimes get frustrated and feel like we don't do enough or we do not good enough, and you are the best example of just keep working until it gets better. Cannot express all my joy of watching your videos, Thank you very much!

[@Covingsworth]

Thank you so much!

[@3DWiz]

Judging my work too early and scraping it is one of my worst traits - glad to hear there's more people suffering from this. Haha Excelent video and visualisation! Love the result too

[@XavierAlbertStudio]

You not only master creating a beautiful, mesmerising scene, you also master breaking it down in a convenient, interesting tutorial. Thanks for your efforts please never stop pushing limits!❤

[@Covingsworth]

That’s really kind thank you

[@Svaggykoupe]

the lighting of the mountain/kingdom is so mesmerising that you can’t see shit

[@tylerdobson7868]

Lighting huge scenes like this has always been the part I struggled on the most, gonna try your method tonight!

[@Covingsworth]

Good luck!

[@ButterDragon]

I really struggled with realistic sky lighting/background, gonna try this method. Thanks for the tips 👍

[@Covingsworth]

so glad it helps!

[@Vassily_Andrzejczak]

Diving more deeply into blender after a year of break and learning other soft, finding your channel is a goldmine and each video / tutorial is a real delight to watch and a great learning experience ! Love it dude keep it this way ! 💪

[@Covingsworth]

Thank you Vassily!

[@apollon_2509]

This is one of the best things i saw on the Internet so far!

[@D.F.G]

13:06 seeing georgian monastary made my day thx for using this assets

[@AhmedMabrouk-uk8ud]

it says become a member to download . can u tell me how to get them for free?

[@simeon_vkv]

HE IS BACK! This dude is a legend

[@Svaggykoupe]

or maybe you’re a n00b

[@robertdouble559]

Looks GREAT. Anyone who knows me knows I don't throw around compliments unless they're warranted. Top work.

[@orcanimal]

The shot looks really professional

[@cupidelarocha]

You make it look so eazy, believe me, its not that eazy...great works by the way...

[@stache_obj]

EXCELLENT EXCELLENT final result!!!

[@Covingsworth]

Thank you Stache!

[@SviatoslavPetrov]

Aaaamazing result! Thanks a lot, for sharing your experience!

[@stefun2410]

please make more videos like this, they are amazing

[@MrShapolin]

Hola, en la creación de escenas y tu forma de explicar, las herramientas y tu proceso de creación; eres el mejor que varios profesores que tengo ahora en mi estudio, estoy estudiando Animacion 3D y ahora veo esta parte y la verdad mis respectos por ti. Muchísimas gracias por tus conocimientos.

[@Xhiblic]

It felt so weird to see so many castles and churches from right next to where I live appearing all of a sudden in a video I randomly clicked on. Great tutorial though. I learned a couple of things ✌

[@begalooloo]

WWWWooooooooowwwwww you nailed it....mindblowing

[@hunteriadkins]

Always look forward to your posts covingsworth! Another great tutorial!

[@Covingsworth]

Thank you 😁

[@coldway]

This is next level my man. So far you've done amazing video tutorials that felt more like AAA games, but this one...wow...It's movie level. Chapeau. I can say that this is better than the CGI of House of the Dragon. Hands down. If you keep on this level of quality I must subscribe to your patreon lol

[@romanograsnick]

Nice, thank you. Especially the disteribution of vegetation and the use of atmosphere was good. Would like to see some more fantastic looking landscape with otherwordly plants and floating, shimmering crystals haha

[@ethanotterson5719]

Covingsworth is a legend

[@Nathan-ey7jn]

Figured I would share my notes I took! Chapter 1: Sky and Lighting • He thinks HDRIs are much better than image planes • Use HDRI for backplate NOT LIGHTING. Then use blender sky texture for lighting. Chapter 2: foreground foliage • All of the plants he uses can be found on Graswald for free • Plant scatter setup: ○ *SCREENSHOT* Chapter 3: Mountains and Terrain • Mountain from Gaia • Make mountains the same scale as real life using human scale reference Chapter 4: Atmosphere • Principled volume, density 0.001, anisotropy 0.52. • Color is very important. Set color to a blue Chapter 5: Terrain Improvements • Just scatters trees and bushes covering THE WHOLE THING, no gaps. Idk how this doesn’t break his computer. • Adds cliffs from quixel to the mountain. Chapter 6: Kingdom • Uses Sketchfab to get high quality FREE scans of castles

[@Covingsworth]

Nice!

[@savagesauron4147]

Many thanks for sharing your workflow!!

[@jbdh6510]

you have over 30 k subs with just a few videos. That's impressive!!!

[@CinematicCroissant]

0:05 What the, this is insanely cinematic

[@sauravspillai8000]

Exceptional Work !!! holyyyyy !! Such an inspiration

[@SanjeevKumar-be4dd]

Need more of this....great work

[@DimiArt]

13:37 definitely reminds me of dragons dogma! Love this video!

[@stormygamer675]

Wow, this really movtivated me into tyring blender. Nice vid by the way!

[@Covingsworth]

Awesome!

[@yeahokben]

wow! fantastic work and thank you for sharing + making it so easy to follow along

[@Covingsworth]

Thank you

[@Gametime05577]

Looking Awesome ❣❣❣

[@mylittle3dworlds]

Tks so much for sharing your process!

[@HamzaARTi]

as amways amazing envirenmennts i am a character artist but your videos are just something i enjoy watching and wanna try from time to time

[@Covingsworth]

Thanks I’m glad you like the videos

[@SART-bn8lb]

wonderful explanation thanks alot

[@Covingsworth]

Thank you

[@etienneman]

you keep raising the bar!

[@Covingsworth]

thank you bro!

[@nxdgna]

Amazing work bro

[@NickKorzh-j6l]

Wow 😮 Amazing

[@Nickel3D]

Awesome stuff brother 🔥🔥

[@ngkgamingtamil4858]

Thanks for the amazing work ❣

[@AbooKay_Sama]

What a gorgeous shot, man! Great work! Can I ask where you found the HDRI sky for your project? It looks awesome.

[@Covingsworth]

Thank you! I wish I could but I don’t actually remember

[@narensoni3705]

Brilliant Bro!!

[@jkartz92]

marvelous!

[@TheArtOfGreg]

Thats incredible !!!

[@BhaveshKoul]

Great tutorial, how to get the plants waving in the wind like you did

[@khalid-sz8gl]

king .

[@janbarsk3077]

I really love it that so many different aspect of landscape creation is concisely packed into one single video, but I also have a question: On the mountain where the buildings are, you added a lot of shrubs and some trees. AFTER that you added heroic cliffs and the building meshes. Does this mean that that the shrubs and the trees give way to the heroic hills and the building meshes? Or is it that they all coexist in a strange way?

[@Covingsworth]

Thanks! And yeah they all kinda coexist, this is possible because the camera is far away. Although once I added the cliffs and buildings I did edit the scatter a bit to give way to certain things

[@janbarsk3077]

@@Covingsworth Thanks for the answer. I understand that some pragmatism can be a good thing, going back and forth with some trial and error. 🙂

[@JuanGonzalez-nn6dw]

instead of manually 3d scanning google Earth data you can import it directly into blender with the GIS addon, it works wonders.

[@dyn-01-h5n]

awesome 🔥

[@learn3dtutorials]

Thanks for sharing

[@darwinbarwin]

goat is back 🙏 😭

[@nix7r]

bro is back!!!

[@RawfunRahman]

Insane work but how did u mix the water level with the terrain? Like the sand and the terrain are mixed seamlessly

[@Covingsworth]

Just a plane with water, then anywhere the terrain touches the water I painted sand :)

[@xiaolimiao]

thank you for sharing, that’s great 😍

[@thomasaseymour1165]

This a photo right? This looks so real and beautiful!!!

[@stings7]

lol i was literalliy thinking of how to make a castle scene

[@ghaithmemo8760]

Very cool work, can you talk more about the render setting and how much time it took to render your scenes? i think this can really help us as well :)

[@ENORMOUS26]

this is just the tutorial i was looking for still i have a problem while creating scene like this if you want it to be perfect from all side of view like a video game map

[@P9_STUDIO]

Delightful 💘

[@KarenSedrakyan-KS]

Nice Work Buildings with a cross are Armenian churches in (the far right corner).

[@Covingsworth]

Oh cool thanks for the info!

[@MuriloSantos-fb7jh]

Awesome

[@KalasaniKeshav]

wooooowwwwwwwww amazing work bro please continue

[@Covingsworth]

thank you!

[@popitastic]

Great overview. How did you do the water?

[@Covingsworth]

Just a plane with a water texture on it

[@PixelRealmCG]

great tutorial ! did you work with different view layers in the on the same file (and then recomposed) or everything on the same layer?

[@Covingsworth]

Thanks! And no not for this scene, everything is on the same layer.

[@mersadkeikha677]

wonderfull keep going

[@Alen20649]

OMG looks real

[@arhamsulman4704]

oh my god its amazingggggg

[@CGDave-hc9nx]

got good help from this video

[@robertdouble559]

Is there away to stop the various species of plants interpenetrating each other? Beyond adjusting the scenes.

[@mohsinali03]

Dude amazing Tutorial!! Ive also got a suggestion for that hdri situation where instead of using the sky texture you can use another copy of the same environment texture and connect them both to the same vector mapping then use the light path node so one of your hdri will work as backplate and you can use the other one to control the exposure. I think Ducky3D did this method on one of his tutorial for making screens. Cheers Mate!

[@Covingsworth]

Ah yeah that’s a great idea actually

[@stfVFX]

Nice content man! I just subscribed!😊

[@Covingsworth]

Thanks bro! Been admiring your work for a while now

[@Loubardeur]

It would be great to add a chapiter on rendering and compositing

[@samsayegh5155]

Thanks for this amazing video ! Can you just write the website you're mentioning at 5:11 to download plants ? I'm earing grass wall but can't find the website..

[@Covingsworth]

Thanks! It’s called graswald

[@samsayegh5155]

@@Covingsworth thanks !

[@almightybryce4988]

I really like your work dude do you think you could make an entire movie if you wanted.

[@RestlessBogatyr]

COV! You're alive! I never got the memo, so I have to ask. Will you ever come back to streaming?

[@Covingsworth]

What’s up man!! Hope you’re well. I probably won’t do streaming in the same way that I did, but I can’t say I won’t stream again.

[@scarit.]

Hell yeah!

[@rahidmahbub]

Amazing render,my man. I just have one question, how did you have the grass in the foreground sway like that?

[@Covingsworth]

Geometry node based wind system - I have a tutorial on my patreon about it!

[@Budgy_2308]

awsome

[@flonkplonk1649]

There's a landscape generator in Blender as well! Btw what a hell of a computer are you using? Seems an absolutely overkill of a polygon amount.

[@Covingsworth]

It’s actually not too high poly. Everything with detail is instanced 👍

[@agyab3d]

i love this whole video ❤.. thanks for the great tips

[@Covingsworth]

so glad you found it helpful!

[@H4SEEB六]

simply goat

[@slappy_chimp]

hmmm you ever felt like sketching then building scenes from your dreams? I'm learning blender just to do that lol

[@bUildYT]

bro found his upload button again :)

[@Benn25]

How did you manage the wind in the plants in foreground? I assume 4D noise in the geometry node tree, but as those are instances, they should moves all in the same way (please don't tell me you realized those instances...😅). Or only those are hand placed? I want to know, because it looks very good! :D

[@Covingsworth]

Thanks! I have a super detailed tutorial on wind on my Patreon :)

[@RedDragon.f3i]

I can already make cool animations❤❤❤

[@arhamsulman4704]

How do you manage Vram with such a huge scene ? do you render in separate layers ? or use cloud render farm or have more than 1 gpu ? Edit : or do you optimize your scene really well ? What resolution of assets and textures you are using ?

[@Covingsworth]

I try to use 2k textures where I can, and try to use as low poly meshes as possible. I have just have gpu

[@h-unte-r_]

Good job realy 😯👍👍👍

[@ollied2025]

oh man, I feel bad to be so picky with such an amazing render. there is one little thing that caught my eye which is that the leaves on the bushes don't move with the grass. Otherwise i would have thought this a photo or a shot from house of the dragon

[@sonunarwade1252]

Step 1:- get Nasa pc 😂❤

[@ElchamBerhaora]

too many polygons 😢

[@cgnovice2969]

Render layers

[@flonkplonk1649]

@@cgnovice2969doesn't help at all in viewport.. and Blender tends to crash pretty often if your memory and system is overloading. Only thing helping would be the Simplify option....

[@flonkplonk1649]

@@cgnovice2969doesn't help at all in viewport performance

[@victor.novorski]

I recommend going with Amd RX graphics card mainly because of their bigger VRam. I bought a 4060........ I sit quietly while I render each single LAYER after another and composite it.

[@Steve.philip]

and another masterpiece

[@Covingsworth]

thank you steve!

[@Dr_UZAIR_KHAN]

Brilliant❤

[@thzockt]

How long did it took to render the final thing?

[@MrSami-tv6vl]

Will you ever make a castle course? Just as Impressive like your urban environment course.

[@Covingsworth]

Possibly 👀

[@MrSami-tv6vl]

@@Covingsworth Hopefully soon.

[@vertikals2060]

how can you work with such as many poligons in your render. Like that scrub scattering on that hill.

[@ckm3865]

Good but did I miss how to add the water and land to the gaps in the mid ground?

[@NekoSamaIru]

3d scans, hdri, volume, multiple terrains from Gaia, multiple particle systems . . . 𝘴𝘪𝘨𝘩 . . . my PC is already crying, and I haven't even started making this! I am a bit sad, because I really wanna try this. It looks so fun!

[@Covingsworth]

Yeahh it does require a good PC unfortunately, but you could probably make a low poly version of the scene just fine 😀

[@Svaggykoupe]

with low parallax shots like this one you’re better off using AI to generate far away elements and comp that with the cg foreground, an interesting full cg tutorial would be one with strong parallax