Build a stunning environment
3D Artist Magazine shares one of their Blender related articles.
Carrie Mok writes:
Robert Nathan Garlington has written a fantastic tutorial on creating a clifftop ruins scene in Blender using Blender Guru assets.
Over the next 17 steps we’ll be going over the design, workflows and some quick tips that were used to bring Vigilant to life in Blender. Since composition is the key to creating a memorable and lasting image, we will be exploring various simple but powerful compositional techniques developed by classical and digital artists. Then, once we have blocked out the foundations of the scene, we will be diving into the details and learning how to use assets from The Rock Essentials assets to create convincing looking rubble, cobblestone and custom sculpts with photoscanned brushes. We will also explore how to add particle grass from The Grass Essentials assets to specific parts of the models for that extra fine level of detail. Ultimately the renders will be exported using the OpenEXR format and brought into Adobe After Effects, where colour grading will be applied to make a final image that stands out!
Gotta love this tutorial:
“use the rock essentials” 70$-397$
“use the grass essentials” 84$
Agreed. I wish there wasn’t so much of this Billy Mays style “Guru” marketing crud masquerading around as CGI modeling education.
My thoughts exactly. He mentions:
Rock Essentials: $397
Grass Essentials: $84
Pro-Lighting Skies: $197
Poliigon – $10/month minimum
The Grove – $115
That’s about $800 worth of stuff to follow his tutorial. Ridiculous, this is an advertisement, not a tutorial.
Yes, in hindsight I agree. I’m getting a little tired of such promotional articles, I’ll do better to filter them.
Hmm I can see the concern but I still think there’s value in the tutorial as an educational piece, even if he’s talking about his use of Blender Guru assets.
Rob does talk about some great artistic and Blender techniques in there with the vertex painting and volumetric node steps, so the whole tutorial isn’t focused on *only* steps teaching to use assets that cost money.
And I do think, that if we’re critiquing The Rock Essentials being mentioned and costing money to purchase for example, then why not critique the use of After Effects in which he actually says “Blender has a solid compositor, but it can’t outshine a dedicated program like Adobe After Effects”, which is £20 a month.
Apples and oranges. Speaking about After Effects is an appraisal of the comparative strengths of two different software environments. That’s no conflict of interest there for Garlington. However, since Garlington is a part of Blender Guru and helped develop these “essentials” add-ons, he is encouraging laziness among modelers while shilling for a product he gets compensated for, all under the auspices of a “workflow and composition” learning series.
Outstanding image!
Interesting, how mountains were made…
Yes, i like the mountains too. But he does not say how he did them in the article. I bet it’s made with world machine. Great software…but quite expensive too…..
Rob Garlington works for Blender Guru, and made most of the addons he talks about. I believe he did most of the rocks, and he made most, if not all of the grass essentials, as well as building pro lighting skies if I’m not mistaken… So if he can do it, shut the heck up, and make your own… Get a camera, try some 3D Programettry software, and make some rocks… Shoot some hdris… Model some grass… Use the sapling addon, or the modular tree addon… Or seriously, just go buy the grove.
Um, if you’re going to be lazy, and just whine about how this is an advertisement, then at least take away the concepts he used… This is a set of tips really.
Step 1 – Use Real World Scale (No purchase needed)
Step 2 – Vision Scene and Blocking (No purchase needed)
Step 3 – Play with the Camera (No purchase needed)
Step 4 – Decide on a Focal Point (No purchase needed)
Step 5 – Establish the Lighting Early On (No purchase needed)
Step 6 – Model the Basics (No purchase needed)
Step 7 – Gauge the Negative Space (No purchase needed)
Step 8 – Add the textures (No purchase needed)
Step 9 – Use the Rock Essentials (Purchase required, unless you make your own rocks)
Step 10 – Embrace the Multiresolution Modifier
Step 11 – Create the Trees (No purchase needed)
Step 12 – Hand Place the Rocks (No purchase needed)
Step 13 – Work with the Grass Essentials (Purchase required, unless you make your own Grass [Gleb has a terrific tutorial on this])
Step 14 – Apply Vertex Painting (No purchase needed)
Step 15 – Apply Environmental Cloud Effects (No purchase needed)
Step 16 – Add in the Character (No purchase needed)
Step 17 – A Passing Grade (No purchase needed [Gimp])
Okay, there are only two steps that require a purchase, however, you could model your own, and skip that entire problem. That’s the problem with the Blender community today, and the reason Blender is so far behind 3Ds Max, and Maya in the industry… We’re not dedicated.
Way to completely miss the point.
Actually, that wasn’t entirely fair of me. I believe that you did fully get the point and then proceeded to flip the script. The objections raised here are not rooted in laziness — not one solitary iota. In fact, this “set of tips” actually *encourages* laziness, in the form of Garlington encouraging the reader to build a stunning environment by “purchasing these products that [he] created”; a much more productive recommendation (leaving aside altruism for the moment) would have been, “here are some tutorials by Gleb Alexandrov that will make you an independent and capable artist, without putting money directly in our pockets here at BlenderGuru.” With that in mind, who among those here who have commented, accurately, on the chosen approach, appear to have a problem with laziness? They are advocating *against* laziness, and your assertions and point-by-point breakdown do nothing to suggest the reverse.