Fake Large-scale Forests in Blender

[@cgboost]

⇨ Download the project files here (click on KZbin 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

[@Hartley94]

Great system there.

[@beaustine6093]

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]

​@@beaustine6093 Same thing to me... I see black trees (only in cycles render)

[@beaustine6093]

@@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. 🤙🏻

[@adrianstarfinger5721]

This is a real smart paradigm to have in general, not just for trees!

[@NupeWoop]

Paradigm as in you can use this for other areas like people buildings, light poles, etc

[@NupeWoop]

?*

[@galaxydirewolf6606]

Doing environment scenes in college. This is literally perfect, Thank you!

[@galaxydirewolf6606]

@Loniyke it's one in the UK

[@KingKong19100]

Same here haha

[@hankookofthewest]

for me i am going to london met rn@Loniyke

[@grim789]

You can go to college for this? Is it necessary, like, what's the degree in animation?

[@State-Of-Mind]

@@grim789 they're going to college and learning more from free blender tutorials loll

[@jon_franklin]

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.

[@theDyingArts]

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.

[@MartinKlekner]

Cheers, glad to hear that!🥳

[@kelajuan_]

Thank you for listening to our requests of remastering this tutorial 😄👍

[@MartinKlekner]

🥳

[@dimashekmatyar1439]

jangan laju2 bang

[@liridoncani]

This is unique. Its not only improves your rendering but also looks as realistic as 3D. This is great for large scenes. Amazing video.Thanks a lot👍

[@WolverineMKD]

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!

[@MartinKlekner]

Welcome, and thank you! ☺

[@tomgallant9205]

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.

[@cgboost]

Thanks for the additinal tips ^^

[@Rockndolls]

You can make amazing backgrounds with that technique

[@Groffili]

It's smart, it's versatile... and I love it!

[@wasoha]

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.

[@cgboost]

Thanks for pointing this. Actually 4.0 makes a real improvement in handling normals .

[@ali32bit42]

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

[@MartinKlekner]

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.

[@ali32bit42]

thats why i said to use object space normal maps. they are specifically designed to keep the curvature of the surface@@MartinKlekner

[@MartinKlekner]

Thanks for the note, ill have a look@@ali32bit42

[@DrTheRich]

Btw, what you do with the rgbcurve node, just dragging one point to bend the curve, is basically the same thing as using the gamma node, which is a bit faster to calculate, and neater

[@MartinKlekner]

I somehow grew accustomed to the Curves node but no problem in using gamma :) Gives you less freedom, but in this case, its fine ;)

[@samk9632]

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

[@Purpial]

Yoo what's up Kruger!

[@xanzuls]

Exactly what I was thinking. Especially with geo nodes, I was able to instance thousands of 4D animated scans in Blender and have it play real-time.

[@thisspaceforrent5737]

Just dug up the file I made with the old tutorial and started tweaking. Thank you so much for this!

[@MartinKlekner]

Glad to hear!

[@claudiusraphael9423]

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!

[@_stanfx]

You're a legend Martin!! Thank you for this tutorial and the course :)

[@thomas7726]

This is gold! Helped me a lot (doind a massive asteroid field)

[@gurratell7326]

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 :)

[@TruthSurge]

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.

[@gurratell7326]

@@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!

[@ثلاجاتمستعملة]

​@@gurratell7326waiting for the results

[@TruthSurge]

@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.

[@gurratell7326]

@@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 :)

[@Dradeeus]

Woah this is actually the first time learning about the matcap that shows things as normal colors. Just never came up before.

[@kuhanesh]

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?

[@goddessxiaowu]

can you share the .blend of this 0:00 or can i buy it because i would like to use it for our school project 😅 please 🙏🙏

[@teammetavian]

Nice tutorial. verry helpful information for creating cg invironment thank you to provide valuable amount of information keep it up

[@duck_entertainment]

Yep! That’s going in the blender playlist!

[@AmberSantana-is3dq]

2d is perhaps the most important and powerful tool in 3D modeling because it’s not heavy on the hardware and sometimes the quality is better

[@RenierBoshoff]

Fantastic workflow! Thank you!

[@TruthSurge]

amazing vid! It would have taken me about 52 years to figure this out on my own w/o any example!

[@_Thevoidcalls]

Wow its a great tutorial! Thank you so much for showing me how to do this! I’ve been trying to make trees foe awhile and this really helps!

[@GrimK77]

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.

[@Zolbat]

14:30 should the green (up/down) channel really be inverted?

[@xenobiiiia]

Incredibly useful tutorial, thank you!

[@Marc_Fuchs_1985]

I feel smart having used this 2D trickery before this tutorial. =) Though not as elaborate into the details. I came to the idea to do such a thing, simply through videogames. Even today they need to watch out for the ressources, but 10 or 20 or even 30 years back, developers were relying on loads of trickery, such as 2D elements. PS1 and N64 games usually couldn't exist without those. So many elements in those old games were 2D. Which was still not the end of the optimization process, since they also had very limited memory for things like textures. So you needed to use 2D elements, but which were also blurry/pixelated as hell.

[@elcamsterino4798]

I learned so much from this video, Thanks! I had no idea about so many of these techniques

[@WanerRodrigues]

Really cool, thank you! Adding tags to search latter billboard billboards 2D trees

[@iluvpandas2755]

What do you mean?

[@WanerRodrigues]

@@iluvpandas2755 I can search on my comments history and find the words I used, billboard is a good word for me to find this video, but the word isn't in the title, this keywords commentary help me to find it

[@alexismejiasdepexproP510]

excelente!

[@ThisGuyIsOld]

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

[@MartinKlekner]

I will address the shadow topic in the next part :-) Thank youfor the note! 🙂

[@comosdedos]

Can't wait for the next part then !@@MartinKlekner

[@redfiend8479]

please add the follow up video of scattering the image planes to create something to what you did.

[@MartinKlekner]

Will do!

[@SmoStory]

Love it! Thanks.

[@KenMFT]

Making the maps just look sick, didnt know thats how they were made

[@KingKong19100]

Nice job! I’m very curious as to how to render out a holdout for a view layer but have it NOT cast a shadow onto other layers

[@kuhanesh]

In cycles, you can go Object Properties->Visibility->Ray Visibility->Shadow (check/uncheck). Not sure if that's what you're looking for !

[@KingKong19100]

@@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!

[@dariond4893]

Great tutorial, perfect amount of info

[@alexandreancel6423]

Truly useful and awesome advices, thanks for sharing, Martin !

[@craneyu7287]

Thanks for your tutorial One question,how to separate the leafs and branch?

[@MartinKlekner]

If you have separate materials for the leaves and the branches, you can go to Material menu and in edit mode, hit Select on the leaves material and the separate selection with P. Alternatively, I recommend using assets where the branches and leaves are already separated.

[@craneyu7287]

@@MartinKleknerthanks so much for your reply.

[@ojotropico2120]

Amazing tutorial, thank you very much ✴

[@descendinguniverse]

00:00 Large scale forest with a large scale donut😀

[@shadowmonarch_]

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.

[@DonaldDrennan]

I am doing a large landscape, but I'm running into this problem moving the camera around. If I zoom out too much with the scroll wheel, I can no longer move the camera. I can rotate it, but not change it's position. If I zoom back in, past the "breaking point", I regain control over it. What am I doing wrong? My landscape is a plane, 16093.4 meters square.

[@von.3d]

Hello. For some reason, when I render the index passes, the leaves turns out to also be white. Why does this happen? Your render got it black while the trunk is white. @6:35

[@MartinKlekner]

Shouldn't really matter, you just put an invert node after your Index Pass image texture and it flips the black and whites...

[@von.3d]

@@MartinKlekner actually, both the trunk and leaves were white in different saturations. I got it fixed. It was just the pass index that I had to set to 0 instead of 1.

[@3dlab334]

Juast discovered you guys! I'm really IMPRESSED

[@sharp4271]

My poor pc was dying due to trees, this was exactly what I needed! Thank you very much!

[@SimFiftyFifty]

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.

[@steprockmedia]

Wow. That's a landmark training session - no pun intended!

[@ege.the.engineer]

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?

[@claudiusraphael9423]

Can particles as used here be animated/tweened to keyframes - e.g. to let a tree burn or bloom, etc.? And are they addressable like instances?

[@kuhanesh]

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

[@claudiusraphael9423]

@@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!

[@john_donne]

Awesome! Thank you!

[@jmtm00]

Does this course covers also rendering and if so, wich engine you are using in this course? All best

[@cgboost]

Hi, thanks for your question. Yes, the course includes the rendering part and uses Cycles as render engine. ~ Masha

[@Lord__Gold]

Small input at 2:14: any resolution you can put there is rectangular. You meant square. :)

[@jakejake6029]

Your tutorial was so helpful

That was fun and interesting. Thank you very much.

[@BenjaminZinn]

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.

[@cgboost]

Yeah I think you can totally do that with grass! ~ Masha

[@DGVillain]

Animation is beautiful 😍

[@brutalheetman5357]

Waiting for part2

[@valtaoi1586]

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

[@MartinKlekner]

Ive made exactly that in my Master 3D Environments Course :)

[@ComplexTagret]

Nice tip, thank you a lot! And you are right, the last chapter of the video should be scattering along surface. Anyway, thanks!

[@Tecillius]

Thats an amazing tutorial.

[@ghufranahmad5730]

Pretty clever

[@SumNumber]

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)

[@ShohSlaought-hh6qe]

What to do if i change my camera when im making animation plz answer i mean the rotation of trees

[@TEST-kw2xw]

I love (not really) these types of tutorials - it all comes down to "buy my cool addons"

[@cgboost]

Only that using the technique shown in the turorial does not require using any addons.

[@spyegle]

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 :')))))))

[@Mr_sibo828]

plz give us a part 2 i really need it please

[@man_art_man]

Unter 👍🏻 have to try it first. Does it work with standard default blender Tree gen (in curves) ?

[@cgboost]

It should work for any 3d models of trees - just follow the guidelines in the tut when making the 2d textures out of the 3d trees.

[@binyaminbass]

This tut comes as I am trying to render a long animation in a park with lots of grass and trees and I used geo scatter which was great but it’s just taking forever. I wonder if this is worth trying for grass?

[@cgboost]

If the grass isn't too close to the camera, you could totally try this out. ~ Masha

[@ian2593]

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.

[@ian2593]

It's ok. I just generated the masks using compositing nodes and the material index.

[@romanpasechnik2891]

@@ian2593 I have the same issue. If I gave Pass Index = 2 to the trunk and Pass index =0 to leaves then it works for me.

[@tigerlily896]

@@romanpasechnik2891 thank you for this! my trees look so much more varied now

[@bUildYT]

excellent

[@BigWallsy]

Thank you.

[@mrCreepsy]

Since the shading of the tree also changes with the camera rotation, this is not very practical if the camera is rotating, isnt it?

[@namdoyle]

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?

[@hundegemechu855]

How can i separate the leaves from the trunk?

[@TruthSurge]

6:00 watch that

[@MartinKlekner]

It has to be the way your model is built, having trunk and leaves separate...

[@AmberSantana-is3dq]

@@MartinKlekneryea otherwise you can use select as

[@mercylucero8160]

wow i like this!

[@anashajyoussef2905]

thank you

[@yzoro9358]

Is this method also ideal for making like a grassy environment also?

[@cgboost]

Yeah it should work with the grass too, if it's not too close. ~ Masha

[@zeronsham]

Great job.

[@basspig]

What if you used a spherical camera and place the camera inside of a cylinder or a sphere and projected the image onto the spear? Wouldn't that make a 3D fake tree instead of a 2d fake tree?

[@starsartbar]

couldnt you pack all of the details into an openexr file for better optimization?

[@Karonclip]

Beautiful

[@israelmarzo5318]

Quick question this be use in game engine such as unreal or units?

[@marsmotion]

yes

[@dwsel]

V-useful tutorial!

[@sk8soxerr]

Is this working for the latest Blender?

[@pa_artiffect]

While using this planes as particles it does not follow(rotate along the axis) the camera.

[@cgboost]

Hi, it's hard to say what's wrong without seeing the file. Can you please post it in our community? community.cgboost.com/home ~ Masha

[@tudnofich]

Magic.... Really !

[@NarekManukyan]

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

[@MartinKlekner]

Just render out the trees from the too, similar angle as your final scene 🙂

[@NarekManukyan]

@@MartinKlekner but as the trees follow camera, they will be visible as from side, but from the top🤣

[@MartinKlekner]

@@NarekManukyan I think playing with the constraints and changing their axese will solve that :)

[@Spartacular]

Hi is there a discount on this course?

[@cgboost]

Hi, no unfortunately right now we don't have a specific discount for this course. We have a generic student discount you can request by contacting us: www.cgboost.com/contact ~ Masha

[@Mr_sibo828]

please tell me how you scattered those trees

[@MartinKlekner]

Soon, I will release a second part of this tutorial, focusing on this topic...

[@Mr_sibo828]

@@MartinKlekner thank u very much I need this in my school project , and thank u for making this tutorial

[@SurinamElephant]

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 ?

[@MartinKlekner]

Hi, both, in one chapter we create mountains using ANT landscape addon, in another using shader nodes, and then we also import height maps.

[@Prahinsfilms]

What about proxies

[@roadtoenviromentartist]

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.

[@noobplays4376]

Wow I didn't understand anything but I am excited to learn

[@YTmingle]

How to use it for UE5.??😢

[@degibocu]

you are awsome dude