hi there my name is dj i'm from
garagefarm.net academy and in this
tutorial
i will show you how to prepare a base
for an artifice exterior scene using
blender gis add-on
that will be importing some gis data
from the web using a real world location
to create our environment
pretty useful and pretty powerful for
any artist project
this tutorial is a part of a bigger
series which we are doing as a team
remotely you can get some nice tips and
tricks from all of the videos covering
different aspects of the pipeline so
let's jump straight into blender
so first we need to download the addon
and you can do that straight from
github of course the link is in the
video description as well
you can find two versions of the add-on
there
one is the development version and the
other one is the current stable version
it's installed pretty easy just like any
other add-on for blender you can
just go to the preferences add-ons
install and then
pick the zip file that you have tick the
button
and enable the add-on once you enable
the add-on you have the gis menu
in the upper toolbar in my case it was
next to this
search because i have the other add-ons
enabled and if you have just the vanilla
version
of blender it will be next to the object
menu just like this
so let's have a look on what the addon
offers
you can see there's a bunch of menus
here we won't be covering all of the
features of the add-on but just the
basics let's import
google satellite maps first click ok you
have
kind of like the google earth inside
blender so you can zoom in and out of
the
map and it imports the map data into
blender
so one cool feature that you can use to
easily navigate through the map is
going to a location pressing g it's
giving you this pop-up window and you
can go
anywhere like rome for example all the
roads lead to rome
and you can set up the zoom level
depending on what scale of map you need
to import let's check it
let's zoom some more you can see the
city even more
so there's some piazza that's on pizza
and you can
press e just to crop the map and
have it imported as a kind of plane with
the
image texture and it's not just the
image texture but it
imports some data so you can also import
height information
and this will deform your mesh according
to the gis
height data and that's not all because
you can also import some other
data like for example buildings let's
make this
as separate objects and click ok and
boom we have some piece of rom
so let's check if it works with other
places like manhattan
let's go new york press e and import
the buildings this will take a bit
longer
okay but finally we have some
skyscrapers
and nice cityscape okay but this is a
holiday cabin project so let's go
somewhere more rural
so why not english mountains let's go
west dale this is the lake district
and let me just focus on where i want
the map to be centered i want the piece
of lake and a few
mountain tops let's pan it because
the map will be cropped exactly to the
terrain that is viewed
in our viewport press e and we have our
plane
with our mountains now the plane is all
flat so let's elevate those mountains
let's import elevation data
wait a moment and boom we have our
mountains
so we can already see the landscape that
we'll be
placing our cabin in the textures are
pretty pixelated because this is not a
high resolution texture but it gives
some basic information about the terrain
and that will be pretty much enough to
start working
the plane is just plain so let's
subdivide it
just a bit to give it a bit more
resolution
you can see that the elevation data is a
bit more accurate right now
and that's because the add-on really
imports the map as a displacement
texture
and also adds a subdivision modifier
to give the mesh enough geometry once we
subdivided it it's even more dense
and right now i'll pick the terrain that
will be our
kind of like first plan let's make this
piece of mesh
a bit more dense and the background
areas
less dense so we can keep seeing
optimize
taking into account what will be near
the camera and what will be farther from
the camera so that it doesn't need so
much geometry anyway
i'm tweaking the modifier and applying
it
because i will be exporting this outside
of blender so we need just geometry
not modifiers which are not really
easily transferable
the difference in geometry also cause
some gaps here in the joint
so i'll correct it manually probably
won't be visible anyway because we'll be
scattering some trees
i'll add also a plane to serve as our
surface lake water and i'll make sure it
intersects with our
landscape and create a shoreline
i'll also get rid of the part of a mesh
that's beneath the surface
i will need those vertices and i'll
select the edge of the lake
and subdivide it even more so i'll have
some denser
terrain and near the place where i will
be placing my cabin
and i'll select the edge and using
proportional editing i will just lower
it a bit
downwards so i have a clear intersection
between the plane of the water and the
terrain that will avoid some artifacts
when planes are too close together and
might there might be some overlapping
i'll do the same in this part as well
and i have my leg
shore when i place the camera
somewhere around here it's already
looking pretty nice
and now just to make it look a little
bit more realistic i'll
make a basic water shader
just to preview my scene and have a
feeling of how the final
environment could look like and to do
that i'll introduce some waves using
noise textures connected to a bump node
just to give you know the reflections a
bit of
fake watery ripples
and to give it a bit more variation i
also mix
two nice textures with different scale
so i'll have some parts of the water
with more waves and some kind of like
calmer water and i'll be previewing both
of the
nodes using node wrangler addon that
gives me a preview
in the viewport of what each noise
texture looks like
now i can see the patches of black and
white
and i'll use that just to mix those two
noise patterns
and have like a more variated water
surface
i'll just import the mesh of the cabin
just to have an idea on how to lay out
the whole scene and how to position the
cam in the cabin in the environment
so i can have some nice shots of the
cabin itself
with the background and i need to
position it so
that the view from the cabin is also
like
a nice view of the lake just like an
architect would place
this kind of a cabin in this real
environment
the client needs to have a nice view
from the window that's why the window is
made
just to light the interior and also to
let the view of the sides
inside i'll make a part of the of the
shoreline flat so i can position
my cabin model i'm having a look from
the cabin
yeah it looks nice i'm trying to find
some nice shots already with a camera
i think this looks promising that's all
for this tutorial but
uh i'm also making the tutorial about
art directing this whole project laying
out the basics for the scene
and giving some feedback to the artist
which will be making the final renders
in 3ds max
based on my basic ideas and the mesh i
prepared for him
so see you in the next parts of the
series
[Music]
you