Udemy

Creating 3D environments in Blender

This course helps you creating wonderful environment scenes, organizing your workflow, and find the right inspiration.
Length 1 to 3 months
Effort 5 hours per week
Price $ 15
Subject Design, Art
Level Beginner
Languages English
Video Transcripts None

A very unique Blender 3D course about the creation of environments, taught by environment artist Rob Tuytel. Through out each of the many lessons you are introduced to the powerful and free Blender 3D program. After becoming familiar with the Blender user interface, students will learn how to create a landscape design from scratch. Additional videos in this series teach students how to apply materials, lights and even advanced node systems (principled) to their models. Finally, this series will show students how to make an organization plan and create a very advanced environment scene including buildings and characters.

The final course scene was rated well on Artstation with more than 340 + likes. Find out what makes an artwork special and be part of the developing process.

You will learn:

We start with installing Blender and making some simple objects. We get in touch with the Blender interface and I will show the most used buttons in this course. This comes with full in depth lecture documentation ( PDF) .

We continue with making a fence and add a simple wood texture. You will get in touch with the UV image editor and learn how to apply textures on your model. Then I will explain the material editor and show how nodes work (principled shader) . You will learn how to make a simple shader combination to add moss on the fence. I will also show some other shaders like transparency and translucency. This chapter includes a Material node book ( PDF ), a must have for making good looking materials

After these lessons we start with the building process, first making a simple building, but after making some progress we will start creating more advanced buildings, including ornaments. We Use Unity 3D to import the models including baked maps.

After completing the buildings, we start with the nature part and I will explain how to make grass, flowers, weed, rocks and trees. We will use 'The Grove 3D' to generate trees. After the nature part we will make a landscape scene and add all the objects including a sand path with water puddles.

After the nature chapter we will focus on atmosphere and lighting, using the point and sun lamp to make a light setup. We will also use an environment map to light the scene. In the end we will use some atmosphere fog to create mist in the scene.

Then it's time to create the final scene, we start from scratch and use a scene map as a reference and make a rough setup. From that point we build the scene and face all the challenges that comes with environment modeling. In the end we do a final review and finalize the scene.

This course is recorded in blender 2.78c and 2.79. We will use the cycles render engine

Who this course is for:
  • This course is meant for artists who like to grow in their workflow
  • Beginners
  • Environment artists
  • Game level artists

What you'll learn

  • Creating stunning unique environments

  • Organize your workflow to make large environment scenes

  • More than 250 unique 2K / 4K textures

  • Lots of medieval reference photos

  • E-book: Old Masters Unveiled ( 250 pages)

  • All scene assets, including buildings, rocks, grass, trees and more

  • 6 Characters to fill up your scene

  • Full course documentation for the Blender basics chapter

  • Baking your models and importing in Unity 3D

Course syllabus

Chapter 1 - Before we start Chapter 2 - Introduction to Blender and Setup Chapter 3 - Materials Chapter 4 - Create a simple building Chapter 5 - Create advance buildings Chapter 6 - Nature Chapter 7 - Road and paths Chapter 8 - Light and atmosphere Chapter 9 - Creating a scene from scratch Chapter 10 - Final review + tips & tricks [Bonus]

Meet the instructors

Rob Tuytel

Founder Texture Haven

My name is Rob Tuytel and I have been a full time Blender user for the last 12 years. I have always loved using my imagination to create 3D art and Blender has been the right tool to help me with this.

Even before I started using Blender, I always loved environments. When I started to create them, I studied art books in order to be able to design these kinds of scenes in Blender.

My 3D artwork is now used in art books, featured in 3D artist magazine, museums, and even appears on nationwide television. I was honored to be asked to create environment scenes for the Blender Institute open movie Tears of Steel. This was a fantastic learning opportunity that allowed me to work with other environment artists. Learning new skills in such a project is one of the best ways artists can bring themselves to a higher level.

Together with Greg Zahl I run the Haven platform. Providing free high quality texture scans. To see more of my work you can visit my Artstation profile page.