F*ck hard work, do things the easy way
iam the kind of guy who spends most of the time inside the house, on my computer, i dont cook, i dont travel and the only thing that gets me up is your Mom. kekkekekee.
but seriously i hate doing hard work and unfortunately making 3d is hardwork, you have to commit 100s of hours learning to make things, and making them takes alot of time too, thats if you are doing everything by the book.
if you are learning blender to get hired by hollywood, please skip this one but if you just want to pump out good looking renders in a matter of minutes without worrying about what’s under the hood, then this video is for you.
we are going to look at easy ways to achieve great detail without handwork.
1 using texture decals
texturing requires alot of steps, you need a properly uv mapped mesh to texture it correctly, but you dont need a properly uv mapped mesh if all you need is to make it look textured. you can use texture decals, all they are is a simple subdivided plane that has the texture you want, shrink wrapped on a wall, or any mesh. this is very easy to do but you can make it more complicated as you want. this trick is so popular, its used in unreal engine, and i made an addon based on it called texture decals and other artists have made there versions like decal machine.
2 Making buildings
popularized by ian hubert, this technique of making buildings is quite effective, all you need is a texture of are building, make some loop cuts around the details like, façade, windows, doors, ac units and more, then extrude them making sure they match with the textures applied to them and with some lighting, you can create an entire city in one sitting.
if you want even lazier but effective way of making buildings try the free building generator buildfy or this new product on the market PBG
3 None Refractive glass
if you are rendering interiors or archviz or anything that need glass in it, avoid longer render times by using non refractive glass shader, the shader is setup to look like glass, though you don’t get refractions, you still get reflections which do not require as much time to render like refractions, so for things like glass windows and doors this shader is perfect, you can copy the setup in the screenshot.
if you need more procedural shaders like this checkout sanctus material library
4 fake water
if you are a woman watching this, i want you to know that faking being stimulated does not have to end in the bedroom you can also fake water simulations inside blender. there several ways you can do this, if you are doing something like water going up in a spiral, try using this technique in my tutorial all you have todo is is just extrude a mesh and water details and add a solidify and subsurface modifier and deform it using a curve it. if you want something even simpler you can try a water shader using a noise texture as a normal map but for something more complicated, JesseMiettinen on twitter is working on some geometry nodes water simulation that looks better than what i can do with blender manta flow fluid simulation, he sometimes gives out his projects for free on gumroad so you can check his page to see if this one is available yet
5 fake fire
unless if you are making explosions, you don’t really need to make fire by doing a smoke simulation, there several ways you can create fire in blender and one i just discovered is by the use of sprite sheet, sprite sheets are very popular in 2d game developments, there just a sequence of images that plays like a gif but you have control of what frame shows depending on variables like key pressed, for example a character jumping can play a different image.
i was on twitter and i saw this tweet or this X, not sure how we call them now. Ness managed to make this fire and smoke simulation by using a splite sheet and geometry nodes, he is probably doing more but let me show you how to use any sprite sheet in blender.
other creators have come out with other clever ways of making fire like this curve fire generator by singhFX
6 fake people/silhouettes
if your rendering epic scenes, you can add mystery to them by adding fake people, or silhouettes of people, Kaiwan Shaban has a great collection of these silhoutes, they are usually just png images of people or objects that you can put in your scenes to give them more character, if your question is why use silhoutes instead of actual characters, because, they are light, easy to use, and render faster, they also look great. since they are very light you can have a collection of different poses.
7 Fake interiors
buildings are easy to make, but buildings with interiors are harder, so a quick and easy trick is using parallax shaders,i already made a video about it just want to make sure you guys know about this free parallax building pack by kitops.
8 Fake Trees
like silhoutes, trees dont have to be actual geometry you can use a simple texture on a plane trick, and make it always face the camera using a track to constraint and making the camera the target of that constraint, this guarantees that the tree will always be facing the camera, the limitation with this is if you are using multiple cameras, the track to constraint does not automatically switch to the active camera, one solution is using multiple planes facing different directions. another solution takes the form of an addon called Alpha trees which will help with alignment of the camera for you no matter how many cameras you have in the scene.
9 Fake Crowds
we have already seen addons that handle crowd generation really well like, procedural crowds but if you don’t have the budget for such addon, watch this 1 minute tutorial of ian hubert on how to animated crowds really easily in blender.
10 Height maps
when you want detail at no cost, think height maps, think alpha maps, most of the time when people think of height maps, they think of mountains, but you can do much more than that, you can create ornaments, sculptures and more with height maps, all they are is a detail map of something represented as a grayscale texture and using them is quite easy in blender and cheap.
