Original subtitles

Setting Up the Blender Workspace

In this lesson, I'll walk you through enabling some helpful add-ons

to speed up your workflow.

We'll be focusing on the free ones for this course,

but I'll also intro you to some paid ones

that have helped me out with my own projects.

There's always a stigma in 3D

that you have to make everything from scratch yourself.

However, if you find an add-on that helps speed up the workflow,

by all means, go ahead and use it.

Let's check out these add-ons.

Now that we're more familiar with Blender,

let's talk about the add-ons you can enable

to speed up your workflow,

make your project a lot easier to work on,

and help you with any Blender projects that come along.

Blender is a free software and there are a whole bunch of add-ons

developed by the community and by Blender developers

that are built into Blender that you will be able to enable here

by going over to Edit, Preferences, and then there's a tab called Add-ons. Some of these come enabled by default, but a lot of them are unchecked,

so you can scroll through and see which ones appeal to you.

I won't cover many in this project

that might work for other projects you like to work on.

There are a couple that I want you to enable by default

and one of them is the A.N.T.Landscape.

Add Mesh: A.N.T.Landscape.

What this will allow you to do, similar to adding an object like a cube,

if you hit Shift + A, and go under your Mesh tab,

you'll now have a new selection called Landscape.

If I click on that,

it's added in this landscape thing to my scene.

This will come minimized by default, this little tab,

but if you click on the bottom left,

these are the settings you can manipulate

to control different parameters on your landscape.

If you change some stuff out, like different mesh sizes, for example,

if I bump this up to 30,

it takes a second and it'll re-scale our mesh.

If I go to Operator Presets and click this dropdown, there are a bunch of default terrains that can be added to your scene quickly

using some of the noise modifiers of this add-on

like this crystalline cube here.

I often use these for background elements

and we'll do the same in our final project.

We'll be creating some quick dunes or mountains in the background

using this add-on to fill out the scene's background.

This is a nice one to have and use.

Another add-on we'll enable

for shading or texturing of our scene is the Node Wrangler.

This will allow us to do some shortcuts and hotkeys

when we're adding shaders to our scene here.

Another nice one to have.

The last one here from Blender

is the Import-Export Images as Planes add-on.

What this will allow us to do is import in that same Add, Mesh tab here.

If you hit Shift + A, and go down to Image,

along with Reference and Background, you'll have Images as Planes.

When you click on that, it will allow you to select an image that you can bring into your scene as an emission plane,

so effectively you're putting a nice background into your scene.

I tend to like to use HDRIs by default in my scene,

but they don't always give me the flexibility I want for my background

so I bring in an image.

We'll cover that when we get to it.

Those are some that are built into Blender,

but there's a whole bunch of others that are both free and paid

that you can bring into Blender that work wonders.

I'll point out some of the free ones that you should install

to speed up our workflow,

but I also want to point to paid ones that are awesome as well

and will take your projects further.

It's optional, you don't have to buy these.

I wanted to point these out

in terms of great nature assets to use for your scene.

If I open up my Viewport here, I want you to download this one first.

It is a free one, you can do the free plan.

I use that one for Blender.

It's called BlenderKit.

You can hit to download it.

To install an add-on like this,

in Blender it's the same process as before, you go to Edit, Preferences, Add-ons, and click Install.

Then, you'll find a ZIP file, you don't need to unpack it.

Find the ZIP file for BlenderKit, hit Install,

and then it will show up in the side tab here.

It will say BlenderKit.

What this will allow you to do is search for Models,

Materials, Scenes, HDRIs, and Brushes

that are free and you can bring into your project.

For example, if I just click on Architecture,

it'll take a second to search its online catalog.

You can search for free first here.

It will take a second to load these up.

I’ll click on that again to refresh it.

Sometimes it takes time to load,

but you will get a bunch of assets that you can add to your scene.

If you click on this bench, for example,

it takes a second to unpack it, bring it into your scene,

load the file up,

and then it will be an object that you can use in your scene.

Now, we've got this Vintage Victorian Street Bench to use in our scene.

There are great assets here and sometimes I use these

to fill elements in my scene that I don't want to model by hand.

If I didn't want to create this bench by default here,

it's easy to find a 3D model from the BlenderKit catalog to use.

They have a whole bunch of materials that you can use for your scene

and a bunch of different search criteria to look for here.

We'll tap into some of this for the background elements.

I want you to design some of your own materials,

so we'll cover that too,

but for throwing some detail in the very back of our scene

like mountains and stuff, I tap into some of these

or use these as starting points and then modify them to my own.

Check that one out when you're installing it.

Another one we'll be using, which is great for archviz

is the Archipack.

This one also has both free and paid versions.

Go for the free version, that's the one I use in Blender.

Same process as before to install.

What this one will do, let's hide this bench for a second, is have a great option in the Create tab here of Archipack

to be able to create windows, doors, stairs, walls, fences,

and things in your scene,

and have a lot of flexibility when adding them in.

If I add in the staircase, for example,

it shows all the different measurements of this in meters, which is great.

It adjusts this.

If I go over to my Archipack, which is...

I have so many add-ons enabled here.

The Archipack tab.

There are different things I can manipulate with this.

I can change the Width of the staircase, you can see it changing here.

I can change its Height and Thickness underneath here.

I can remove these posts, the panels, etc. if I don't want them.

We'll tap into this a few times during our project

to design some of these staircases for my scene.

Also, as I said, it has some doors, windows, and stuff that you can use.

A fun add-on.

I'm using the free version here and you get great stuff with it. Have look at that one too.

We'll also be talking briefly about some of the paid ones here.

This one is Physical Starlight and Atmosphere

that I use quite a bit for texturing my background.

It’s a more flexible HDRI setup.

It's a paid add-on, but I use this for my projects.

You can see one of my projects featured on their site.

It's a nice procedural sky background.

You're able to adjust your sky quicker than just adding an HDRI.

You have so much control over adjusting the Atmospheric Falloff.

You can add procedural clouds, stars, etc. to your render.

That's a fun one to check out if you're tired of using HDRIs

and want more creative control.

Blender does have a built-in sun, if you will, in your scene.

If you go over to the HDRI tab, you can use a few different things.

They've got the Sky Texture, which works pretty well,

so you can use that one.

It's one that they've been working on, Nishita Sky Texture.

There are a couple of other options. It's not available in Eevee, it's a Cycles-based one.

If I pull over into Cycles here for a second,

you see you get a bit of atmospheric falloff.

You also have some control over this, you can adjust your Sun Size

and other parameters here like Air, Dust, and Ozone.

You have a bit more basic one here in Blender,

but the Physical Starlight and Atmosphere one

has so many more parameters here like Procedural Stars and Clouds.

You don't need to install this one, it's just to point this out

as one that you can consider using.

Then, a couple that I use for plant creation.

This is Scatter5,

which is a fantastic add-on that has so many different controls

over the scattering of your assets across your scene.

Not just for nature assets, you can use this for anything

if you're adding in different plants and stuff to your scene,

and also buildings and stuff.

In this example here, they've added buildings and stuff to the scene.

It's a cool add-on and very fun to work with to create quickly assets on planes and stuff, for example, in your scene.

What I'll do is often add a plane here, give it some subdivisions,

and then you can select it and scatter any objects onto your scene.

If I choose my Scatter Biome,

you see I've got a couple packaged here by default in Scatter.

If I just click on Import, it quickly adds them to my scene.

We've already got some grass scattered in a believable way.

That's the key, a believable way in our scene.

We'll explore ways to scatter particles.

There is a built-in one in Blender too.

This one has a lot more flexibility.

I just wanted to point that out.

A couple more to use for these assets.

TerraScape is a nice one

that has different packs that you can purchase

with various assets, trees, and plants for your environment.

I've got a couple of these that I use frequently for my scenes.

For our project, for just the free side of things,

we'll tap into BlenderKit built-ins.

There are trees and stuff that people have modeled

that we can use to create our tropical elements. That'll be fun as well.

One of my buddies, Bproduction, has created a bunch of great add-ons,

including Gardener, Grassblade, and Vegetation,

which come with a bunch of assets too, so shoutout to those.

Lastly, there is botaniq.

There's a trial version for $1 here, where you get a part of the library.

You don't get all of their assets, but a few of them.

They've got a bunch of great trees, plants, rocks, and stuff

that you can use in your scenes.

I just wanted to point that out as an option

for some of the assets to create in your scene.

There are so many free ones built into Blender too.

I'll go back to the Add-ons tab here

that encourage you to explore through and see which ones stick out to you.

There are a few that I won't cover but feel free to look through

and see which ones suit your project.

Those were a few of the add-ons that I'll use for this project, but there are so many other add-ons in development for Blender.

As it's a free software,

there are great developers around the globe

developing new add-ons for it.

I encourage you to keep an eye out for new add-ons that come up in Blender.

In the next lesson, we’ll go through blocking out your scene in 3D.