Piotr Krynski's Efficient Environment Design for Blender #6 Towers and pipes

 Piotr works his way through builind the background elements. Really good, but hard to record specific steps or lessons. There's an approach to simple model bashing, a way of creating pipes and wires by drawing curves onto a plane (because drawing in mid-air always causes the curve to be misplaced.

Textures are bashed from big textures and UV unwrapped by projecting from view.

Quickly made but kick-ass assets

Grabbing more assets from Sketchfab

Piotr likes to get extra assets from Sketchfab. He runs through his workflow.

1. The Sketchfab shader setup causes performance issues due to a complex shader setup.

2. Try using various search keywords as there's a lot of content in Sketchfab with poorly handled metatags.

3. Decimate the shit out of stuff. A lot is high polycount and you're often making them tiny in your scene. Balance asset density to its place in your scene.

4. Cloud planes. Heavy png!

5. Decimate will eventually start to deform the mesh. When this starts to happen shift to the Planer option which uses different methods that don't break the lines so much. Then use the modifier  Merge by Distance. 

This merges vertices that are very close to each other. Also, Limited Dissolve. There's also a Hard Ops function called Clean Mesh. This lets you control some parameters for Limited Dissolve.

Use case: Create a high density ground plane. Decide what parts of the plane are out of shot. Select the parts of the plane that are not going to be visible and apply the Clean Mesh by Selected, selecting the out-of-view parts. 

Looks messy but optimised

6. PNGs for their alpha channels, but JPGs compress better.


Reminder: You can't definitively complete these tasks until your scene is in place and you absolutely know the importance versus resource cost for all the assets. Get most of the way there but don't worry about fully completing the step.

Shot 1

* Starts with Albedo and bump on the meshes. Piotr doesn't worry about specularity for now.
* Adds a sky by cutting out just what he needs for a giant 20k panoramic sky.

This lesson is very stream-of-thought and applies all the earlier lessons. So not much to add here.

Building nicely!

Turn up the Volume

When starting off, try to avoid placing a super-heavy volume right in the foreground. A volume will unify a scene but will wash away the textures you want to pop.

* Go to Light Paths and make sure that you have sufficient volumes.
* Anisotropy affects how light is scattered through a volume.