HOW CAN I CREATE A REALISTIC TERRAIN USING BLENDER?
The creation process of a realistic terrain can be divided up into two parts, the ‘theory’ and ‘practice’. In the first stage, we need to search for a collection of references of the terrain we are planning to create: photographs, concept art, sketches and everything that can help us have a clear understanding of the characteristics that define our desired terrain.
In the second part, we have to create all the models that compose the scene: the terrain, debris, stones and grass with their respective variations. For the creation of this particular scene I tried to imagine the terrain of the valley mainly composed of grass, ivy and flowers, and to do that, I created a small library of images that I can use as references. Once we have created our library of references, following the concept of the scene, we have to create every model that is part of the environment, placing these in the space. To do that we can start to model the terrain, adding a plane and editing the flat surface in edit mode.
Here, subdividing the plane, we have to define the main deformations of the terrain. There are several ways to do this in Blender and one method is the use of the Displace modifier, which deforms the surface of the plane starting from some sample noise textures.
Once all the models are in the scene and the basic terrain is created, we can start to add some details. The best way is to manually model the plane, so in Blender, we can go into sculpt mode to model the terrain. In this part of the work, I suggest you follow all the references that you have, trying to create many imperfections and being very meticulous in the placement of the details, because this makes the difference. I imagined that the mountain was composed principally of grass and flowers.
Now that we have sculpted the landscape, the last part of the work consists of creating the material. To make the terrain material we have to map the model and apply the textures – in this case, I applied base grass textures, and set the anti-tiling addon in the Shader Editor to break the repetition of the texture while scaling it. During this process, once again, it’s essential to follow the references. After that we can start dressing up the terrain by adding particle systems, flowers, and any kind of model that is required for the terrain.