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  • Kent Trammell Jonathan Lampel Wayne Dixon Paul Caggegi
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    Creating a Stylized 3d Forest Environment with Blender

    Instructor:
    Kent Trammell
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    Creating a Simple, Stylish, Comprehensive Blender Environment

    Welcome to this Blender training course about creating a stylized forest environment!

    4 hours runtime, 14 video lessons

    Over the span of 14 videos, you will learn a broad spectrum of skills:

    • low-poly modeling from scratch
    • generating trees and plants with the Sapling Addon (included in Blender)
    • populating grass and trees with particles
    • material creation
    • lighting, and rendering with Eevee
    • and final tweaks with the compositor.

    Simple Low-Poly Style with Big Results

    Sometimes, less is more.

    My favorite thing about this kind of style is how much visual reward can be achieved with little input. 

    You'll see that each individual asset is very simple to create. But when all the individual parts come together -- the result is much more impressive than the simplicity of its parts. 

    Fast Results With Eevee (Just a few Hours)
    In this course, we'll be using Eevee to render. It's so much faster than Cycles and such a fun way to create!

    This low-poly aesthetic makes the timeline from initial inspiration to final render much shorter than a realistic version. What this means: we can start and complete a project in a few hours instead of a few days or weeks.

    Using the Sapling Addon

    Sapling is an incredibly powerful tool that is included with Blender. 

    You just have to turn it on - and immediately you get a tremendous capacity for modeling believable trees and plants. 

    The parameters of the tool are deep and wide. We'll be covering the most-used essentials to achieve the trees we need. 

    You'll learn to use the Sapling add-on for these steps:

    • modeling trees and plants
    • branch splitting
    • branch distribution
    • leaf arrangement
    • preset management

    Out-of-the-Box Blender Tips and Tricks 

    Numerous tricks, tips, and even hacks are sprinkled throughout the 4-hour course. 

    You'll learn these highly useful skills: 

    • Procedurally randomize the color of objects that share a single material.
    • Sweep everything with vibrant color gradients and atmospheric fog. (This effect is the MVP of the aesthetic.)
    • Fine-tune atmospheric depth with a mist pass in the compositor.
    • Leverage physically inaccurate materials to focus viewer attention.
    • Add god rays (shafts of light) with a simple plane + procedural material
    • and more!

    See you in the forest!

    Get this course and 262 others by joining CG Cookie

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    Awarded upon completion:
    100xp +
    Course Curriculum
    1 Review
    • ☆☆☆☆☆
      Martin Aversa(cgtin) ·

      I've tried scenes similar to this one, but they were so ineffient and laggy on my viewport that I'd abandon them before I could finish. With this course I learnt to be smarter on my setups, with many cool tips for doing just what is needed for the render to look good on camera (in still frames renders at least) saving tons of memory not bothering with what is out of frame.

      Also I added valuable knowledge on my shading side of the brain, like with every course here, you always get something new.