
This is the introduction to the course. This will be short overview of what the course covers and what you will be learning along the way.
In this ‘Blender to Unreal Engine 3D plants and vegetation’ lesson, we will look through the basic setup of Blender.
In this lesson, you will be introduced to key information about Blender for 3D modelling artists.
Lesson 3 will be a complete guide to setting up realistic lighting to preview our meshes. We will learn to append a base skylight into our project and adjust its settings.
Starting from this lesson, you will be introduced to foliage modelling. We will walk through the steps of creating a simple shrub shape from a 3D plane in Blender.
In this lesson, you will find out how to add depth to your mesh and make the foliage look realistic in 3D space.
This lesson will introduce you to the UV unwrapping toolkit in Blender. We will walk over the basics of setting up UV coordinates to be texture painted later.
Starting from this lesson, you will be introduced to the texture painting toolkit in Blender. We will go through the basics of adding colour to our foliage mesh.
This ‘Blender to Unreal Engine 3D plants and vegetation’ lesson will focus on adding more detail to our 3D shrub foliage and giving it more depth using base colour painting techniques on our texture.
In lesson 9, we will be setting up our material parameters for roughness texture values. We will learn how to get micro detail within our 3D plane by making use of the PBR material shader and painting in glossiness textures onto our assets.
In this ‘Blender to Unreal Engine 3D plants and vegetation’ lesson, you will find out how to create a variety of 3D shrub plants bundled up together so that you can effectively populate a 3D environment.
This lesson will introduce you to 3D modelling techniques for creating grass buds from a simple 3D cube primitive shape.
In this lesson, we will look at creating grass bundles in Blender. We will be setting up grass variances to create visually pleasing shapes from any visible angle
In this lesson, we will start adding colour to our grass meshes. We will learn how to paint in consistent colour textures using colour pallets in Blender.
In this lesson, you will find out how to use the proportional editing tool to manipulate your vegetation mesh to give it a more organic shape.
In lesson 16, we will teach you how to get more control over your plant meshes and manipulate your vertices to make the clusters look more natural.
This ‘Blender to Unreal Engine 3D plants and vegetation’ lesson will focus on creating depth in your grass foliage through texturing methods. We will also work on stylizing our foliage by breaking up the colour with a custom brush.
In this lesson, you will be introduced to a foliage variant for our grass planes. We will work on creating more intricate mesh shapes and parts and combine them to create a small 3D plant as part of a grass field.
Lesson 19 will continue to work on our wild foliage variance for the grass. We will focus on creating the stem part of the plant using a basic bezier curve functionality in Blender.
In lesson 20, we will be setting up our wild grass 3D plants from the created mesh parts. We will make use out of stems and leaves to create an organic-looking plant asset.
In this lesson, you will find out how to make use of the wild grass to make plant clusters for the grass fields.
In lesson 23, we will teach you how to add additional colour detail by painting it onto our texture map after the modelling process is finished.
In this lesson, you will learn how to fix issues relating to the overall colour of your foliage texture. We will make use of an overlay method to add a tint to our base colour without ruining already created detail.
This ‘Blender to Unreal Engine 3D plants and vegetation’ lesson will focus on creating the base mesh for our flowers in Blender. We will learn how to pick mesh from our previous work and recycle it to speed up our modelling process.
In this lesson, you will be introduced to local transformation for our mesh to model and shape your flower petals.
In this lesson, we will start preparing our mesh for texturing by setting up our UV coordinates for the yellow flower.
In this lesson, we will begin to texture our plans and add texture detail on top of our flower 3D foliage.
In lesson 29, we will be setting up our flowers with additional detail for the petals. We will learn how to make use of face masking techniques for the texturing process to stylize the petals and highlight their shape.
Have you ever wanted to breathe life into your game world through foliage like plants, grass, water lilies and reeds?
'Blender to Unreal Engine 3D Plants and Vegetation' is very different to any other 3D modeling course out there! Our focus is to create an entire foliage pack completely made in Blender - one of the top open-source and free 3D modeling software out there.
We will not be using any other software to create all that you see in the thumbnail, except Blender. You will also learn about plant and grass animation, and as an added plus, you will learn about how to integrate foliage into a game engine - Unreal Engine 5.
This is great because it means you will get to see how we make foliage from scratch and import it into video games. I am sure 'Blender to Unreal Engine 3D Plants and Vegetation' will be the one course that you will want to keep handy anytime you need to create variations of foliage.
Our 'Blender to Unreal Engine 3D Plants and Vegetation' top 6:
1. Creating vegetation from a simple plane and turning it into a 3D foliage (i.e., modeling from 3D plane)
2. Making use of Blender’s particle system to model foliage including flowers
3. Learning about optimisation and the importance of low poly modeling to get a best performace out of a dense foliage setup within any scene at the same time as maintaining the stylized visuals of custom painted foliage
4. Using weight painting techniques to get better control over foliage position
5. Creating materials for the foliage using UE5 texture customisation and the wind system
6. Learning how to paint water foliage into a scene and how to get more depth out of its volume, painting plants on top of water, inside the water, and underwater
Now, there are courses out there that can show you how to create grass that reacts to wind, but there is nothing that covers the entire process from flowers and plants to grass, and even water lilies and reeds. 'Blender to Unreal Engine 3D Plants and Vegetation' is intended to be the complete guide to creating foliage in Blender.
Blender: 3D Modeling
'Blender to Unreal Engine 3D Plants and Vegetation’ will see you creating 12 different types of foliage with over 30 variations. We start our journey from a simple cube and we through all the techniques you will need to create flowers and stems. This will include low poly modelling techniques as well as more advanced Blender functions using the Bezier curve functions.
As we progress through 'Blender to Unreal Engine 3D Plants and Vegetation', we will be increasing the difficulty of the foliage we are creating. You will also be learning about the most fundamental 3D modelling skills, including how to properly UV plants ready for adding materials to them.
You will be learning about Blender's powerful texture painting workflow. I will be supplying some of my very own custom alpha brushes which you can use in your 3D models and scenes. The texture painting part of 'Blender to Unreal Engine 3D Plants and Vegetation' is huge and has a lot of depth to cover, showing you everything available in Blender. This includes custom brushes, cavity masking, and different map types.
'Blender to Unreal Engine 3D Plants and Vegetation’ will introduce you to particle system setups. This will show you how to populate an area with plants and grass in a natural way, with complete control over placement and smaller variations.
Blender: Animation
Finally, creating your foliage pack which will include grass, flowers and stems, reeds, and water plants, you will be animating all parts using Blender.
We will be going through the entire process of bringing the foliage to life by creating realistic movement. This will consist of adding wind and turbulence to our blender scene.
This will add a massive amount of realism to any Blender renders you might create using the foliage you created in 'Blender to Unreal Engine 3D Plants and Vegetation'.
Best of all, we will also be covering how to light your scene using real-world lighting techniques. To finish off the Blender section, I will be showing you the correct way of exporting foliage to game engines like Unreal Engine 5.
Unreal Engine 5: Game Engine Integration
This section of 'Blender to Unreal Engine 3D Plants and Vegetation' has as much depth as the Blender part. We will cover everything from importing foliage to setting up vertex painting and creating materials. Finally, we will be looking into the foliage tools available in Unreal Engine 5 (UE5), including setting up realistic wind animations.
You will become a master of using the foliage tool in Unreal Engine 5 (UE5). With it, you will be able to set up foliage with all of its settings. You will find out how to change and randomise scale, how to change allignment, and how to make adjust foliage density to achieve nice variation over an entire foliage painting process.
Finally, the Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) part includes a full environment scene composition guide for to enhance your environment without cluttering up the terrain.
Since 'Blender to Unreal Engine 3D Plants and Vegetation' has two parts based on Blender and Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) respectively, your UE5 milestone project will be to present your foliage set in Unreal Engine 5 using a prepared environment included in the course resources and render out a scene.
'Blender to Unreal Engine 3D Plants and Vegetation' is unique because all the foliage is made entirely in Blender. That means it can all be created entirely for free once you realize the true power of this amazing software.
So, come join me on this amazing course and you will never be stuck again when it comes to bringing your scene to life!
Your project will be to model, texture, animate, and optimise 12 different types of foliage with over 30 variations. Of course, you could set yourself a challenge and diversify aspects or details of foliage like plants, grass, water lilies and reeds. You could change the textures, and add different variations or more types of plants, such as different wall-climbing plants, bushes, and shrubbery, to make your environments more alive.
I imagine you using flowers, plants, water lilies and reeds in the fields surrounding the farm in 3D Tudor’s ‘Blender 3 The Ultimate Medieval Scene Course’!
To get you pumped, imagine how well this 3D foliage set fits in with your other 3D Tudor projects.
Be creative! Feature your foliage set around a medieval castle keep with ‘Creating a Modular Kitbash in Blender’. Also, think about using them in other medieval environments such as:
- Around a gipsy carriage in ‘Substance Painter to Unreal Engine 5 Masterclass’;
- All around the ‘Unreal Engine 5 Beginners Guide to Building an Environment Course’ course scene to transform its landscape;
- Next to a river running by a medieval wind and water mill hybrid with ‘Blender to Unreal Engine 5 Ultimate Course’, or;
- To populate and make ‘Blender 3D Modelling & Animating A Stylized Oriental Scene’ even more beautiful.
This course will give you access to just over 15 hours of 3D art in around 82 comprehensive lessons.
Course Resources & Freebies
The 'Blender to Unreal Engine 3D Plants and Vegetation’ resource pack includes 6 custom brushes (alpha textures and other Blender preset formats), 9 image references and a Pureref reference file, and an environment example (.blend file and .fbx file inclusive of 15 textures).
Join this course and come be part of a game design journey of over 15 hours of learning that will see you creating all the foliage you might want in just 82 lessons.
I am excited for you to share your renders and turntables of how you used your foliage in different environments for your portfolios with me. Go beyond the taught material and make new foliage types to represent the flora of different continents.
Check out the free introduction and I am sure you won’t be able to put this course down!
Until next time, happy modelling everyone!
Neil – 3D Tudor