 So I was just messing around on Blender and I thought I would record a little video. So this is kind of what I've been messing around with so far. I'm just going to delete all of this and start over again. So let's see, let's just click in here. Let's just select everything. Let's just delete. So I do have a HDR file already loaded as the background here for the world. I'm just going to leave that because this is the one I'm going to want anyway. And then I don't have to dig through my file system trying to find it. Anyway, so let's let's do this. Let's first off I need to fix this file real quick. This is the Treasure Island set from kitbash3d. Let's see, I think it's got some missing image files. I'm just going to point it to the 2k textures here to save some memory. Let's see, maybe it will finish loading. Yeah, there we go. Anyway, this kit's pretty cool. It's got lots of stuff. I'm just going to use a couple of small pieces out of it. I'm just doing some kitbashing based around some photogrammetry pieces from Ian Hubert from his Patreon. Once again, as I usually say in the videos that where I mention him, his Patreon is great. You should go in and invest in yourself and invest in him, I guess. I think it's like $7 or $8 a month and he puts out multiple videos and gives you lots of these cool assets that he has created for you to use. Obviously, they're also being used in his things, so you wouldn't want to use them in your production work, but they're fun just to make some experimental videos with and try to get the same look that he gets if you like that kind of thing and then recreate it using the techniques that he shows you. Anyway, enough about that guy for right now, but he's great. Anyway, so let's switch over here. Let's see. I think I have another. Yeah, so this is one of his files and this is a bunch of rocks and different pieces that he scanned. He actually lives in the Pacific Northwest as he states on his Patreon and so do I. So a lot of this stuff is familiar territory to me. It's a lot of tide pool type stuff. A lot of different gravel, rock, different formations like that. This is all just stuff from the yard. Yeah, there we go. So it's pulling in. Let's get risky here and try to go one more layer with it. Yeah, so as you can see, this is just various little elements and this is one of those free things I was just mentioning. So anyway, let's just grab, let's see. I know I'm going to want that. So yeah, so let's just start with that. So I'm just going to copy this. I'm going to switch over to my Blender file that already has this HDR background. And let's see. Let's just paste this in. I'm sure there's a keystroke for zeroing all that out. Feel free and let me know in the comments. If you want to, I'm just getting back into Blender. So admittedly, I feel like a new begin at all this stuff. So anyway, I've got this piece here. As you can see, it's pretty cool. And this is done with photogrammetry. So it's a little bit blurry at this resolution, but it's sort of meant to be more of a background thing. And so what he's done here is he's just chosen an area with his camera and gone along and taken pictures. This actually may be with Polycam app that uses iPhone, I believe, and it can use the video camera to do some of this stuff. Either way, there's multiple techniques. He's captured all this with a camera, run it through some software, and made it into a fairly low poly 3D model. As you can see, this is not as vector-intensive as it could be. So anyway, let's switch back over here. So I've already got a camera view here, I believe. I know that's just my camera. If I had a camera, that's what the view would be. So let's do add a camera. I usually like to get the camera set up first so that I kind of don't spend any more time building any more of the set than I really need to for the camera. Let's see. So I have the camera selected. Let's go to view. Let's say line view. Oh, I can't... Why is that? Oh, because I'm in camera mode. Let's see. Let's get to some type of a view here. That'll be good enough for now. So now we will use this command and we will pop the camera to where we are. There we go. Okay, so let's see. Now we will begin to just basically duplicate this thing and move it around. I highly recommend that you use Alt-D. It uses less memory. It uses the same object basically. So any changes that you make to the object would be duplicated across all the ones that you've used Alt-D to duplicate as opposed to Shift-D, which makes it a separate instance, but also uses more memory. So I try to use Alt-D whenever I know I'm not going to make any changes to the base mesh. It's just way easier on the rendering. Let's see. So let's duplicate that. Let's lock it to this. Let's just rotate this around a little bit. Yeah, let's see. We'll do Alt-D again. We'll lock this one to the y-axis, pull it back toward the camera a little bit. Again, Alt-D. Let's lock this one to the x-axis and let's see. Let's move this over here. That probably is okay. Let's see. Maybe let me drop that down just a little bit. Yeah, that looks a little bit better. And so now let's just kind of select all of these all together and then let's Alt-D that, lock it to the y-axis, move it out. It looks a little copy-pasted right through here. So let's kind of grab this. Let's just, you know, let's rotate some things. Kind of rotated more than I meant to there, but that's all right. I guess very much like nature, we're just trying to kind of randomly stick some things out there. Lock this one to the x-axis. We'll move this huge chunk over. Let's see. Yeah, that's good. We'll do this one again. We'll lock this one to the y-axis. We'll move this on out. Let's rotate this thing around a little bit. Yeah, that pretty much fills in that gap. Let's see. Yeah, and that doesn't look too repetitious considering that we just used one asset. All of this is just one asset. So as you can see, Blender is very, very zippy considering how many faces it has there. So anyway, let's go back to camera view. Let's add some water next. And there's lots of different ways to make a really good water material. I'm just going to do a real simple thing here just to be fast about this. I don't want to take a lot of time on this video. So there's my plane. I'm going to just expand this guy on out pretty much to the horizon. That'll be fine. So let's see. Now let's switch over to the material for this. And let's see. Let's name this water. And let's see. You know what? Let's just make this glass. Let's just do that. Let's turn the roughness all the way down. Yeah, I know this is probably not the best way to do this, but it's going to be okay for now. Let's see. Viewport, that's not even showing. This is important. I need this to be blend. I need those to be turned on in case I want to use Eevee. And I think that's pretty much it. Yeah, we'll see. So let's see. So I'm already in Cycles GPU. Let's see. Let's raise it up a little bit and see what happens. Let's see if we get a little bit of... Well, that's certainly an interesting effect. I'm not sure that was what I was going for, but... Interesting, huh? Look at that. I've never seen it do that before. I guess that's just the reflection of the... I mean, I don't even know how that's reflecting the rocks there. So that may be just like a little cashing glitch or something. Oh, I see what it is. I'm not in full lit mode. Whoops, my mistake. Anyway, so let's switch over to full lit mode. And ta-da, there it goes. It looks great. So let's see. Let's just grab more of this rock. That water looks kind of stretched out there. So grab some more of these pieces. I don't want to grab that. Let's duplicate this. Oops. Let's make like a little peninsula piece going out there. Like that maybe. Yeah, we'll see. And then let's see. Let's just grab another couple of these little pieces here. And Alt-D. Lock them to X. Let's find a G and Y. And let's see. G and X. Let's just move like another little piece of land out here. Yeah, that just kind of gives us some structure. I could go a step further on this plane. I could add a wave modifier to it. But it's okay for right now. I'm really just kind of focused more on the foreground here. So and speaking of foreground, let's go ahead and let's see our wind camera view. There we go. Let's do a couple of camera things here. Let's see how do I have lots of cameras. I'm not sure how that is. Let's see which one is my active one. My active one is three maybe. I don't know. Let's just start deleting them until I regret it. Yeah, looks like I'm on camera three. All right. I'm not sure how I had so many cameras. I must have duplicated the wrong thing. Anyway, let's see. Let's change this focal length to like 22 or something. Yes, that didn't change. So obviously that's not the camera that I'm on somehow. And yet it has to be because that's the only camera that there is. You know what? Let's see where is my active camera. Strangely, not something I've ever had to deal with. And now I have to deal with it when I'm recording a video. But anyway, there we go. I think that probably did it. Yeah, there we go for sure. All right. So let's go back and fix this again. Let's... Yeah, you can see here how close these rocks are fairly low poly. Let's see. So used to Unreal Engine for a long time. I'm just still just kind of getting back used to where I was with all of this. Let's see. And I think that was the general direction that we had. Let's do this. Let's lock this camera to the view. Let's back out and get my bearings. That looks about like where it was. Yeah, I think that's pretty good. I think we'll just keep that. All right, so let's move on. Let's... I mainly kind of wanted to show how cool this looked even under the water. Fairly photorealistic. So let's see here. Let's... Let's switch over to this other file. Let's grab... Yeah, let's grab this. Let's grab this boat. Let's put this boat into our scene. Let's see. Let's see. Back that back up. Let's turn off the camera to view so just so I can move it around without disturbing my camera angle. Let's see. As you can see, that's a pretty cool looking boat asset. Obviously, these are free, but they are fairly high quality. All right, let's see. So let's go back to our camera angle here. I think in the other one, what I had ended up with was I kind of rotated this around a little bit and bloop. I suppose it wasn't that way. Yeah, there we go. That was more like this. And then I think I just kind of had it stuck on the rocks over here maybe. I'm just hitting R and X and to kind of rotate this around on the X axis. Let's see how that sits. Yeah, that looks pretty cool. It looks like it's resting on this and resting on this and this is up a little bit. And you can kind of see that it's kind of stranded there. That looks pretty good, I think. So let's keep that. All right, so let's save. Blender likes to sneak up on you sometimes. Let's see. Let's grab one of these other things, but I don't really want to do a cloth simulation right now. So I'm not going to grab one of these. Probably in a future video, I'll use something like this hammock and I'll put some wind and cloth simulation on it. That should be pretty interesting. For now, let's see. Let's just grab one of these little shack things and stick it out in the water. Let's just do that. Yeah, that's kind of interesting. Let's have that little shadow in there and have it maybe here. So we've got something on the third. And let's see. Let's rotate this guy around and see what it looks like on the inside. I think we're going to want the silhouette of the side like this. Yeah, I think it looks kind of cooler like this having that silhouette and that shadow on the inside. Let's see. Let's just move this back a little bit so that those objects are intersecting. And that looks kind of cool just as a base render. So normally at this point, I would make a cube around it. I would turn on some volume and I would add a little bit of mist to it. I'm really kind of trying to break that habit. So what I'm going to do instead is I'm going to use, let's see, yeah. So these are some basically video textures. Once again, these particular ones are from Ian Hubert, but you can use any type of steam element or dust or any other type of thing with a black background and you can load it into your own plane and do whatever you need to do with the material to make it fit into your scene. These are already ready to go and they're part of this kid ops thing that I'm trying out. So I believe I can just grab one of these. Like let's grab this slow diagonal and let's see. Maybe I can click this to say put it there. Like maybe I do this. Okay, so it's there somewhere. Let's see. Oh, I see it. I need to, oh, I have to click to add it to the scene. Let's see. Let's rotate it around the Z axis like this. Let's rotate it on the Y like this. Let's G and Z to kind of bring it down a little bit. Let's see. So the first time through on the playback, it should just be caching all the frames. Yeah. So it's very, very slow moving and I'm on cycles as well. So that kind of looks like trash. But anyway, let's see. Let's move this forward a little bit. So it's really like in front of the camera. And then once again, let's use Alt D and let's see. Let's lock this to the Y axis like this. Let's scale this guy way up hopefully. Yeah, it's kind of weird right here how that's intersecting with the water, but it's not terrible. So now another thing I want to do is go into the world environment here. And I just want to kind of pull this down. Let's see. Let's do like 0.8. Maybe let's see what that looks like. Yeah, it's kind of cool. It's a little more moody looking. Let's see. Yeah, maybe that looks pretty good. Let's see. Let's just save it. Let's check our render settings. We don't need to be quite that high with it. Let's see. Let's go. Let's just do that. So we're basically the same. Yeah, let's basically set it just basically the same as what we're looking at in the viewport here with the denoising. Yeah, you know what? Let's just go with that. Let's see what that looks like. All right, great. Finished. That wasn't bad at all. Cool. So there we go. I'm going to save this off and make this the thumbnail and probably show this at the beginning of the video. But if you made it this far, thanks for watching. Make sure you subscribe and like if you like it. And if you learned anything, check out Ian Hubert. As I always say, I'll put some links in the description. We'll see you next time. Thanks.