Hey everyone!
I decided to do another tutorial, this time on features (or extensions) of Blender meant for nature or terrain that you can use for your pieces, namely grass using the GrassFree add-on, trees and leaves using SaplingGen, and ivy, vines and roots with IvyGen.
In order to do this, I’ll be breaking down one of my pieces, shown below.
Fair warning
This tutorial can take its toll on low end PCs, depending on the configurations you have for each plugin.
P.S. In my last tutorial I was told by countless people that I should have included screenshots for Blender 2.8 on top of 2.79, so this time I’m going to update this later with a 2.8 workflow.
1.Grass
You can achieve good looking grass with the Grass Free Plugin. Just click on the ‘version’ button, then click the Grass Free (2.7) button to download it. Once this is done, go to file > user preferences > add-ons, click “import from folder”, find the plugin in your downloads folder, and enable it.
Navigate to the left side of your screen, where there should be a ‘grass’ tab. Click it, and then click the picture of grass to bring up a menu of the different types you can use. Depending on the piece, these will be different, just remember that you can always change the colour later, you should just pick the shape of the grass you feel satisfied with. Once you find one, click add, and it will add 3-4 small patches of grass, each different to one another, somewhere in your screen. They will be grouped, and added as a particle system. In order to make use of it, pick the plane you want to add it to, create a particle system and switch it to whatever grass you added (e.g. Zoysia) as shown below.
This will spawn 1000 instances total of grass by default, at a massive length. The number of particles is more than likely not going to be enough for your scene, so bump it up to whatever you need to, whereas the length will be way too big, so tone it down to about 0.1. I generally go up or down by 5000 at a time for the length, and 30000 is about how many grass instances I go for, on a medium sized plane.
Given that the particle system intersperses whatever you choose it to throughout the object you set it to, it stands to reason that whatever changes you make to the original ‘particles’ themselves so-to-speak (i.e. the grass you added in the beginning in this case) will carry over to each and every cluster of grass in the particle system. This means you can change the colour, material and shape to match what you want, without having to manually repeat those changes over the 30000 or so instances of grass you’ll have. For example, I ended up just adding a principled shader which carried over to every single other grass particle, as shown:
If the grass is looking too uniform, there are a few settings you can play with, such as the randomness factor (you need to turn on advanced particle settings for this). See below.
And there you have it, grass! If it’s getting too laggy, put it on another layer or hide it from your viewport by clicking the eye icon next to the particle system.
2.Trees and leaves
Blender has another add-on that can help with trees instead called Sapling Gen. Unlike the Grass Free one, Sapling Gen is in built into Blender, so there’s no downloads necessary, you just need to enable it in File > User preferences > Add-ons > Search “sapling” and enable it.
https://gyazo.com/5a982b2dc235b559eba39434960441c5
It will start off as a scraggly looking set of lines, because sapling generator does not make trees as meshes initially; it starts them off as curves. This means it has no geometry, until you bevel it and turn it into a mesh.
https://gyazo.com/402fc83d1e129432bdd42fbc60746383
There are a number of settings you can tweak, but the important ones are shown below.
Keep in mind that these settings are located in the operation menu on the bottom left, so if you move the tree or deselect it or something, the settings will disappear and you will be stuck with the curve.
Once you’re satisfied, you can go ahead and grow the leaves by ticking the checkbox. Don’t worry about the fact that they’re squares; we’ll fix this shortly.
Note - I’m using 3 branch splitting levels here. Remember that more branch splitting results in more geometry and as such, potentially more lag for low-end PCs.
Once you’re satisfied, you can start adding materials to the leaves and trunk. They will be separated by default, so you just need to add the 2 materials. I tend to just add a principled shader with a brown color to the trees if the camera isn’t focusing on them, but if you’re seeing the trees up close, then you should add a bump map and image texture with some bark to give it some more detail.
Now its time to turn those Shapes-looking leaves into actual leaves. To do this, find a leaf texture, with a transparent background (or just remove the background with your image editor). I used the leaf texture below.
Arrange the material as follows:
Note: you can tweak the settings of the principled shader to suit your liking, I just preferred the way it looked with 0.5 roughness and 0.5 specular.
Your tree and leaves should look something like this:
Keep in mind that the tree is still a curve, so if you want to turn it into a mesh, hold alt+c, then click mesh from curve.
Place multiple around your scene and pair it with the grass to create a nice landscape.
3.Ivy and roots
Another decent in-built add-on for nature related scenes is IvyGen, which, as you can guess, is used to create ivy.
By now you know the drill; enable it in user preferences as shown:
https://gyazo.com/e91cb03b2178adf4122d2eec704a9c37
The usage may be a little different to what you may be used to. In order for the plugin to work, you need a mesh of some sort to place the ivy on. For now, just add a UV sphere, click somewhere on it where you want the ivy to start, then go to add > curve > ivy to mesh.
In addition, in order for any changes you make to the configurations to register, you need to click the “update ivy” button on the top of the operator settings.
https://gyazo.com/1cee87164ea98c5ca957eab8271651ca
Like the Sapling Gen, there’s a lot of settings you can tweak. Here’s a summary of the important ones.
If you want to change the leaves from literal squares to normal leaves, just repeat the process I described in the trees section, where I was talking about leaves. You can honestly just copy and paste the material if you want, if you’re satisfied with that type of leaf.
Here’s an example of the result you might get.
https://gyazo.com/b511c421e75e5d2cf411b35c4d4c9944
The cool thing is, you can do this on any surface and any mesh, so long as the geometry is forgiving enough for the ivy to climb it.
Now, that’s all well and good, but I decided to take this a bit further. Rather than using the IvyGen for ivy, I tried to use it to create roots, and then a gnarled tree trunk, and then a full on tree golem. It was surprisingly quick to do, so here’s the process:
Find an ivy setting that you’re satisfied with, ignoring the leaves. In order to really make it look like roots and trunks, you should put the ivy branch size at a fairly high setting. In this case, I believe I had it at about 0.03. This nets the following thickness.
Now, import a player character and pose it however you want. In this case I just made the arms point up a bit.
You can probably guess what comes next: Spam the ever-loving hell out of that IvyGen until you’re satisfied. I would timelapse it, but my IvyGen is bugged in 2.79 in that there should be a button saying “create new ivy” so you don’t have to constantly tap shift + a > curve > ivy on mesh, but it isn’t there for me. That means the entire process is half as fast as it could be, so its really tedious, and I’d rather not do the entire thing again.
You should end up with something like this:
I added a small bump map to the Ivy as well to give it some texture.
If you're lagging too much
If the ivy is looking choppy or low poly yet you’re still lagging, you can do the following: Add a subsurface modifier (make sure to set the viewport cut amount to something low initially so you don’t crash) to smooth out all the rough edges, then add a decimate modifier, which will lower the triangle count and hopefully make your PC stop lagging as much. I set the ratio of the decimate modifier to something like 0.3, but you can adjust it to whatever suits you.
You can add some leaves at the end for good measure by duplicating the leaves from the trees you made earlier and putting them on the edges of his arms.
Repeat this process with one or two other poses (or if this is too tedious, just copy and paste the first one you made a few times). Combine it with the trees and the grass you had earlier, and boom, you’ve got a nice nature scene with some giant tree golems!
That’s it for this tutorial, hope this helped you! Reply down below with any qualms you may have.
