All language subtitles for 10 Modeling Details and Refining the Scene 1

Modeling Details and Refining the Scene

In this lesson,
we will be modeling and refining

many details in our scene,
specifically looking at our textures

and how to develop
an excellent texturing workflow.

We'll make some complex things,
but don't worry, it will be simple

once you break it down
to its basic building blocks.

Let's get going.

As we have some initial lighting
and a lot of our macro details in place,

let's get into the nitty-gritty
of refining the details of our scene

and adding in some textures
to bring everything to life.

To start, I'll refine the details
on the columns we made.

I made these as linked duplicates

so any changes I make to one,
it'll apply to all of them.

Work smarter, not harder
with these things.

I will do Ctrl + R to add a Loop Cut,
scroll up once to make it two,

hit click down to select it,
and then, we'll commit that.

Now with those selected,
I can hit S and Z

to scale them along the Z-axis.

Now, I can select with Face Select mode

the top section here
and the bottom section here.

Let's hit Alt + E
to Extrude Faces Along Normals.

I can pull these out

to make them look a bit more
like support beam columns there.

Let's once again
add two Loop Cuts in here

and scale these along the Z-axis
so that they're just below these.

I'll have these go inward,

so in Face Select mode, select the top
and bottom faces we just created.

Hit Alt + E and then,
we'll push them in slightly.

One more time,
I'll scroll up along the Z-axis.

Then let's bring these ones out
a slight bit too,

so we have a bit of variation.

This adds some extra detail to this.

Let me select the bottom ones.

If it's doing that, make sure
you're selecting the vertical face there

and do the same thing for the top one.

Hit Alt + E.

Then we'll pull all these out
a bit here too.

Now, I will do a bit of beveling
to add a bit of a taper here.

To do that, I will select this top one.

I will be in Edge Select mode,
Alt + Shift + click on this face here,

hit Ctrl + B, pull down a bit,
and scroll up

so we've got a bit of a curve
down there as well, which looks nice.

Now, I'll select the faces of ribbing
around our columns like this

and do a Select and a Checker Deselect.

This will deselect every other face.

Now, we've got this alternating thing.

I can burn these in by doing Alt + E,
Extrude Faces Along Normals,

and hold them in slightly.

Sometimes columns
can have these bits of detail.

That looks a bit too blocky,
so let's bevel it a bit.

Give it a slight bevel there
and Tab out back into Object mode.

That's looking nice.

We've got some nice column details here,
so let's add some texture to this.

For our texturing,

I'll be using a mix of a lot
of the free textures and materials here

from BlenderKit.

You can use
their nifty search engine here,

search by category,
or search by free-only.

There's Procedural and Texture Based,
image texture-based ones.

I prefer typically
image texture-based ones

because I feel they often look
a bit more photorealistic with things.

We'll also be leveraging
a lot of textures from a great site

called ambientcg.com which has a bunch
of nice CC0 textures to use.

I'll use this sand one here,
which is a nice material

and this plaster one.

I have this plaster one downloaded.

Since we have
the Node Wrangler add-on enabled,

I can quickly add
some nice texturing to this.

To start, I will pull over
this little side panel here

and make this my UV Editor
to see our textures as we bring them in.

I'll Tab into Edit mode on this column,
hit A to select everything,

hit U, select Smart UV Project, and OK.

Now you'll see it's projected over here.

This is a bit small

so when we bring in our texture
it'll look a bit too small.

What I like to do typically
is scale this up.

I select all of this, hit S,
and scale it up by 3.

That works well
when you scale it up that way.

Now I can add in a new texture
and we'll call this a Plaster material.

With our Principled BSDF selected,
I can hit Ctrl + Shift + T,

and this now allows me to search
for the texture I've downloaded here.

I have it loaded as Plaster 003

and I can select the normal,
roughness, and color,

and that is all for now.

I won't use the Displacement
as we don't need that on this column.

The Normal will suffice for us.

You have this blue button
that lights up,

which is to set up
a Principled Texture Setup.

Instead of importing these one by one
and having to plug all the nodes in,

you can click that and it clicks
everything into place for you

and gives you a nifty Mapping node
with a Texture Coord node

using the UV Map
that we've unwrapped before.

If I zoom in a bit on these columns,
you can see that looks great.

You've got some nice details here.

One thing to keep in mind
while adding textures

is thinking about the scale of things.

Let me Tab into Edit mode on this
and scale this down a lot again.

This is initially
how our texture unwrapped

and it looks a bit too weird.

The column looks small scale
because the texture is large here.

We want this to be much smaller
so that it looks a bit more granular.

If this is hard for you
to conceptualize and understand

how big texture should look
on your screen,

reference and look
at real images of columns,

look at our mood board,
and look at some of our architecture

to see how the details of concrete
and stuff look in your buildings

and emulate that
with your texturing scale.

This is at a good scale here

and it's added to all our columns here,
which is great.

That's one object down.

Let's add the same texture
to the rest of our scene here as well.

I want this to also be
on this building for consistency,

so I will unwrap this
the same way as before,

give it that plaster texture
that we created,

and this is a great example
of how scale looks funky on this.

That's looking massive,
so let's select all of this

and scale it up by 3.

That's still looking a bit large
and a bit too gritty here as well.

One thing that you can do
to reduce that grittiness

is to turn down the Normal Map

that's pumping into our Normal output
of the Principled BSDF

and giving the bumps.

If I drop this down to 0, you can see
it's taken away some of that stuff.

Then, I can also pull out
this Base Color,

but the issue with that
is it's impacting our columns as well

and I liked how the texture and the bump
looked on the columns.

If you want to make a change
to a material

and it overrides everything,
you can duplicate the same material

by clicking on this number here
that you see.

That shows you the number of users
of the specific data

and you can click
for a single user copy.

If I click on this,
it makes this Plaster.001

and so now this plaster material
will be impacting our back wall.

You can see the column remains unchanged
and our back wall is being changed.

Oftentimes if the material's looking
crunchy on things,

I remove it from the Base Color

and it's still being impacted
by the Roughness map and our Normal,

so it still has some nice details
that you see if I zoom in.

There's a bit of denoising
so it's muddling it up a bit

but you can see it's got
some nice imperfections and details here

which looks great.

Maybe I'll up the Base Color
a bit into the yellow

to somewhat match our scene here.

I'll maybe turn on the Saturation
slightly.

That's looking great as well.

I'll add this to our stairs as well.

Our stair comes with materials
built into it,

but I don't like the materials
that come with the Archipack

so often I'll remove them like so.

We can add in that Plaster material.

We'll have to give this an unwrap

because there's some
weird stretching there.

I'll Smart UV Project this as well.

Once again, let's maybe use
that Plaster .001 that we had before.

Scaling this up as well
in our texture view.

That is our room textures down there.

That's looking great.

Now let's move on to the most complex
texturing aspect here,

which will be texturing our sand.

This is what I practice quite a bit
for a lot of my renders,

a nice workflow
of making sand look realistic

and making various materials blend
and look realistic like this.

This is the key to photorealism,
breaking up the perfections of textures.

If I bring in the sand by default...

I'll do that to show you how this looks.

Let's bring in that sand texture
from CC0 textures, this Ground 027.

I'll label this Sand
and do the same as before,

Ctrl + Shift + T.

Then let's navigate
to where I've saved my sand texture.

I've saved it under ground, SandGround.

I'll select the color,

normal, roughness,
and ambient occlusion for now.

I'll come back to this
to grab the displacement,

but I'll start with these for now
and plug them into my texture.

You'll see that it looks good.

I'll give this UV Unwrap as well
and scale it up a bit

because those bumps look
a bit too large.

Let's scale us up by 3.

That's looking reasonable.

This is a good start already here.

However, it is not matching
how our references look.

The sand in our references
doesn't look like that.

You can see there's so much variation
in color and displacement.

This looks very smooth

because the water's been coming
over and over on it.

You've got this little border here
between the wetness and the dry

and you're starting to get
a bit more bumpiness

with footprints,
ridges in the sand, etc.

If I go even further over here
into the beach,

it looks even a bit more like this
like we see here,

so we want to break up that variation.

The way I like to do this
is by using Vertex Color maps.

To access that and create one,
go to your Object Data Properties tab.

If I click on this,
we have a few options.

We will be using this Vertex Group
in a bit

to affect the displacement
of our terrain too,

but for now, I'll start
by adding a Vertex Color map.

I go down to this drop-down, hit Plus,

and it doesn't matter here,
but we'll call this Wet Sand map.

What I'd like to do
is group our textures here

and use the same one
and make some variations to it.

I'll pull this up
so you see what we do.

Let's isolate the sand in our render
so we're not rendering everything

by hitting Ctrl + B
and box selecting around here.

Now, this is just showing us our sand
so we can focus on that.

With Node Wrangler enabled,
we can do some shortcuts.

I use these to group textures together
to see what we're working with.

If I select all of this
and hit Ctrl + J,

it gives me a nice frame
around our stuff here.

I can give this a color
and let's call this Dry Sand texture.

This is our dry sand.

It's given a little label at the top
so we can see that.

We can crank that label size up
a bit more

so we can see what it is here too.

That is looking good for now,
so that's our dry texture.

Let me duplicate all of this
by hitting Shift + D,

pulling this down,
and giving this a different color.

Let's give this a bluish color
and call this Wet Sand.

For the wet sand,
what will make it work and look wet...

I'll hit Ctrl + Shift + Click
on this one,

so we're seeing this result
in our Material output,

not the dry sand.

It's impacting the Specularity,
the Roughness,

and also the brightness of this sand.

If I go back to that reference,
this is darker than this sand

because it's wetter,

so having that water
from the ocean there darkens it up.

I can add a Bright/Contrast node
to our Base Color

and let's pull the brightness back
just a hair to -0.100.

That's already made a difference
and made it similar to our reference.

Our wet sand here
is almost perfectly smooth.

I'm bringing this Normal Map down
to something like 0.100.

Having a slight hint of that bumpiness
will give us a good result too.

I'm also turning up the Specularity
a bit so it's a bit shinier.

We'll maybe also give it
a bit of Sheen here

so that on those top edges,
it gives us a nice look.

We can also impact our Roughness map
by adding a ColorRamp node

between our color output
and our connection to the Roughness.

By messing with these, we can change
how the Roughness of our material is.

Inverting these
gives us an interesting look.

It gives a wetter look
to our scene here.

This is looking closer
to what I was hoping for.

Maybe we can bring the Strength down
a bit more,

so it's almost perfectly smooth.

We can play with this
and I encourage you to do so

and experiment and see what works.

I like that shininess here
that I'm getting from this.

It looks nice.

It gives a shiny look to it.

It applies it to everything,

so we want to concentrate this
to this foreground here

and have it transition nice and smoothly
like in our reference to the dry sand.

How do we do that?

We will be using this Vertex Color map,

and the way to see this
is going up to the top left

and switching from Object mode
to Vertex Paint.

Right now, everything is white color
so we're not having any impact here

and we're also not doing anything
in our Shader Editor to influence that.

There's a node I'll add here,
which is a Vertex Color node.

I'll place this here

and in this little box, I can select
our Wet Sand Vertex Color map.

I can pump this into a Mix Shader,

which will be outputting
to our Material Output.

There's something that we need to do
in the interim here

so that we can mix
these two textures together

into our output.

That's by choosing a color for this.

I can go to this little drop-down
color bar here, switch to RGB,

and we can use the Red, Green,
and Blue channels on their own

to influence
how these materials mix together.

Let's start with the Red
since it's at the top.

With Red selected, I can click on Paint
and Set Vertex Colors.

This makes everything on our mesh red.

This entire Vertex Color is red here.

To get the red color channel
from our color output,

we will be using a Separate RGB node

and put the color
into this Image output.

Now, we have the option to select
the Red, Green, or Blue channel.

For this, since it's red,
we want the red channel

and we can use this
into the Factor output.

When I'm using this Factor,

it's a perfect 50-50 split
of these materials.

If I switch it to 1,

we only have our bottom material,
which is this Dry Sand.

If I pull it to 0,
we only have our top shader here,

which is the Wet Sand,
so we want to influence that mix.

So, we'll use Vertex Color.

Now, it's just influencing
the bottom one, which is that dry one

but we want to paint this
to influence that mix.

To do that I can hold Ctrl,
so now I can paint with black here.

Painting across here
will influence the mix of our colors.

Now that I'm painting over the surface,
it's changing things up

and we have that wet sand
mixing into there and looking nice.

We're getting a nice transition.

To scale this down,
hit F and pull along,

and hit Shift + F to decrease
or increase the Falloff of the brush,

so it's giving us
a nice little mask here.

You can see
that it's somewhat off black.

I usually do that for a bit of variation
and imperfections on our surface here

so that it mixes nicely,
almost irregularly like we see here.

It's not a perfect line, we've got
these sandy soil curves going across.

It's nice to influence it that way.

I'll zoom back out here

and hit Ctrl + Alt + B
to see everything again here.

Let me recheck on Render Region.

This is looking nice.

We've got this smooth Falloff
to the surface here.

We've got a great look
and that took a couple of clicks.

I encourage you to do this
and add a different material too.

There are different sand materials here.

If I go back to Materials
and the search bar and type in "sand,"

we have quite a few to work with.

You can try mixing in
some with rocks here too,

giving it some variation that way.

One thing that's not going on
is we don't have any displacement.

My plane is still showing
the sculpting we did before.

We will take this one step further
and add a Vertex Group here to it

and we can call this
Dry Sand Displacement.

We want to influence
the displacement of this

similarly to how we did
the Vertex Color map.

I'll go to the Modifiers
and we need more geometry

because if I Tab into Edit mode,
this is low poly, to begin with.

We don't have much
to be able to displace our terrain.

I'll give this
a Subdivision Surface modifier.

Let's give it a Subdivision of 2
so we've got enough to work with.

You can turn this down in the Viewport
if it's slowing your computer.

You can always turn this on and off

to have it rendered
in your Viewport or not.

We'll give it a Displace modifier
on top of that and hit New.

Instead of Local, we want to use
the UV Map that we did before.

Now we have this option down here,
the Vertex Group,

so I can select
our Dry Sand Displacement Vertex Group.

Now it's not doing any displacement

because there's no texture
influencing it.

Click on Show texture in texture tab
and you can see there's nothing.

This is giving you a preview
of what is using the Displace.

We want to use the Displacement map
that we had

from our texture for the sand.

If I go over here and search "ground,"

you'll see this black-and-white
Displacement map.

If I open that up,
you'll see it load in the Preview

and we'll have
some displacement going on

which will look nice.

Give this a second.

It's not showing anything
because we have this little Vertex Group

and if I go to our Weight Paint,
it's all blue.

Nothing is going on here.

If I were to delete this now,
you'll see we have displacement.

This displacement is a bit crazy
so we'll dial this in,

but let me add that back in.

I want to paint this displacement in
just where it's that dry sand,

we don't want it displacing
the wet sand.

I'll turn this Subdivision off for now
so it is a bit faster to color.

Similar to how we did the Vertex color,
hold down Ctrl

and you can now paint
the inverse of blue.

Paint like this.

The Strength is down, we want this at 1.

I can increase the size a bit here
and there we go.

We can now paint it red.

If you look to the right,

it is now displacing our terrain
where it should, which is great.

We want it displacing
along where that dry sand is.

It looks nice.

If I zoom in, that's a bit too extreme.

We want to turn that displacement
down a bit,

so I'll turn on the Subdivisions
for now.

Let's pull the Strength down to 0.200,
so it's slightly displacing it.

Maybe a bit more, 0.330 or something.

That's looking great.

We've got this working with that map.

If I go back into Object mode,
you can see what it's done.

It's displaced nicely
where those little ridges are.

I'll Shade Smooth to smooth this a bit.

There we go,
we've got this nice Falloff.

When we add our wave texture
on top of this,

it will look even better and nice.

There we go,
that area is all squared away.