Landscape Vegetation Techniques for Efficient and Realistic Outdoor Scene Creation

All right, the next thing to look at is landscape vegetation. We briefly looked at it in one of the earlier videos where we placed the tree. Now we'll kind of go into more detail on where that's at.

So if I was to click on my vegetation and let's click on plants and then right click set active container. Okay, I'm going to go outside now for this case and start adding some plants. If I click my main library button here, it'll pull me out to my main spot.

I click vegetation, you can see that there are multiple elements. There are landscapes, which are more of the kind of the 3D elements like just like this right here. And then there is trees, which we looked at, there are bushes, shrubs,  flowers, there are grass and flowers.

These are these are individual kind of grasses and things of that nature. And there are more detailed grasses, these are where you want to have the lawn with the borders. And then there are rocks.

And then there are miscellaneous just ivy things of that nature that doesn't fall into those specific categories. So let's say for example, I want to populate this huge swatch of landscape, right? There are a couple different ways if I want to add grass, I can click on say, dry grass, and I can actually click and place, you know, each of these little elements of grass and just click on a whole bunch and a whole bunch and a whole bunch. I zoom in there, I see that I had now have grass within here.

But the issue with this is that take a very long time to do. If I was to delete all that dry grass, and then I go into click on this grass button, it'll just place it. So what you can do is actually go into populate down here.

And there's a couple different ways you can do can place your objects, you can either paint it, you can scatter it, space it in area. So let's say for example, I want to paint, so click paint, I want to drag in the grass that I want into this area. Now I have this little bubble of grass that I can paint.

Keep in mind that if I was to drag this, it would actually go into my interior as well. So I want to be very careful on where I am painting. So so as not to mess up the interior with this.

So in that case, I would, you know, erase maybe this portion here in the middle. And then I will actually decrease the size's diameter to be a little more specific and where this is at. Once you start painting in this zone, it creates this almost as a whole group.

So you can't really modify specifically what's happening. But once you're in here,  you can click on your object and you can densify the grass that you want, you can modify the size,  all kinds of different specific categories you can do to this. If you want to add additional grass to this whole brush thing that I added, you can actually drag in an additional type of grass.

Let's say I want to add some of these tall grass pieces, I can click and drag this into here and I'll add those to that same painted vegetation area. And again,  clicking on tall grass, I can modify specifically kind of what I want to do. It's kind of a useful tool.

If I want to create this large scene around here and I want to start, you know,  all of a sudden I want to like, I want to paint more, right? I want, I want to do this whole area out here. And now I'm like, oh man, I want to add some bushes to this, right? I want to add some. So this is a great way to populate your backdrop.

And let's say I want to add a couple bushes to this. I can actually drag it into, you know, this, the same thing, and I'll throw in some bushes. I can actually click the bush and I can decrease the density, you know, how many bushes are going to be there and also the size and et cetera, et cetera.

I'll kind of randomly place them within. So that's kind of that in a nutshell of how to add kind of grass through the, the vegetation paint. I'm going to delete this and I'll go into the next one.

Like clicking this scatter, this would actually scatter it around this entire surface. I'm not going to do it because this material is humongous. And if I was to scatter it on top of this, it could possibly crash my computer because it's such a large area.

So keep in mind, if you want to scatter it, it's going to scatter it across the entire area. And so if you had a specific material that was more in front of this of grass or concrete or whatever, you can scatter it on top of that. So what's better to use under populate is actually area.

And so area is actually where you can create a region. So I want to create, you know, maybe not that far. Maybe like I did undo it,  maybe like right here, I can create this, like this region of where I want the grass to go,  just like that.

And so now in this region, I can actually drag in my materials into here and it'll add it into the specific region. It'll change my spacing, density, it can decrease the size of this area, probability, which kind of creates kind of variations of that bush. You can see here that maybe this isn't quite, it is actually attached down to the ground.

I was wondering if it was kind of floating in the air. It looks like it is kind of floating in the air a little bit. If that's the case, you can always, you know, click on this area and actually pull it down to where you kind of want it to fit on your thing.

So yeah, now if I wanted to add some grass to that, I can go into here and I can just drag some grass in there. You know, you can kind of see it added it, but only in small locations. I can, let me see here, click on the grass, asset properties, increase the size,  update the seeding.

This right here changes a path terrain. Your spacing could be decreased. So one thing I've noticed with this is it's not as good as the brush with modifying each specific thing.

You're kind of very kind of limited to this. So what I would do in this case would, let's like just delete the bush element off of this and let's just play around with just the grass and let's see if we could increase the amount of grass in here, the density of it and the spacing. We want to bring the spacing, you know, all the way down to maybe 0.1 or something.

So it's really tight or one. Yeah. I'm bringing that down to like one feet.

You can see you create a really dense spacing between it or two feet, right? That's the spacing between it. So you want to find that kind of sweet spot. So maybe I didn't need to delete the bush.

Maybe I could have left it and just adjusted the spacing, but the default spacing was pretty high on how it was like. So with grass, you want that spacing to be, you know,  pretty, pretty tight, 1.3 kind of thing like that, but that kind of gives you a good tool. The only issue with this is it painted it.

It actually looked like it detected the building. Why is there? Oh, I see what it did. So it followed along the surface.

When you had it up here, it placed it down here and it placed it on here. So let's see. Can I adjust that? Can I click this and adjust where it's going? Can I like decrease the grass that's on top? That's where, you know, you start running into some questions on what's the best approach to do.

I would say no. And so in that case, you know, maybe it's best to just do an outline kind of around it and then kind of loop around so we can isolate and not have it be in the middle. So that's kind of the area location.

Planting area. The next thing is like,  obviously, you can just drag and drop the bushes and trees and things like that versus utilizing the scatter tool. Grass is the best to do the brush one and those things, but individual like bushes and plants and flowers and trees is best just to drag and drop the trees that you want in in here and this kind of go from there versus doing the scatter.

You can do the scatter if you want it to be kind of all around, like let's say those trees that I liked. If I go into my populate and I do this area and I and I start drawing in, you know, kind of around the building. So not actually inside the building per se, just around the building, maybe not in front of the lobby, right? Like, you know, just something like this, right? This is where I want these trees to go right there.

Now I can actually, again, drag these trees into this and it'll start populating it around that area just to quickly create that that scene. You know,  I can do large trees and smaller trees, just kind of give it a variety. And for each one of these things, I can actually create the size of the specific trees.

And then also, I can adjust spacing on how dense those trees want to be, or, you know, how random they want to be and random spacing and things of that nature. So it gives you a lot of flexibility in creating that more kind of scene environment of these trees. And then, you know, say like, I wanted to add some bushes to this, I can actually click on this area and go into my bushes and, you know, throw in some scroll down, find a good plant that I want, kind of made more of these rose bushes,  drag those in there.

Again, let's go see, click on this, and let's modify the scattering,  the spacing wants to be a little bit tighter for the so that was the thing, right? Is when you when you put all these trees in here, it will, you can't create more density with all of them, you need to do specific groups, right? If I was to modify the scattering of this within here, it's going to modify all of them kind of conglomerately and not independently. So keep that in mind,  utilizing paint tool would actually might be a better situation. So let's delete that and go into my populate and do the paint.

And let's say I wanted to drag in those trees again,  to here, let's say I want to want to bring in, you know, three or four different trees,  just randomly, I'm just randomly selecting trees that I feel like would, you know,  potentially work well together. And now I can actually paint these trees and where they fit. And so with this, now I'm going to click escape to undo, click this painted vegetation, I can actually click each one of these.

And here's where I can modify the specific density of each of these trees. Alright, so that's kind of utilizing vegetation in the kind of the brush painting tools with it. You know, if you want to have the most control, I would just say,  just click once and then click a whole bunch and where you want them to go specifically,  but if you just want to do like a broad stroke, utilizing the paint,  or the scatter tool is a pretty good strategy.