CREATE A CANYON ENVIRONMENT

Build a stunning desert setting with an expert walkthrough from Romain Eboli, who uses high-quality Quixel assets

- Romain Eboli

Becoming a successful 3D environment artist has been my goal for a long time now. After a few years of testing, technique research and learning by myself, I've been able to use several different workflows to get the results I'm looking for.

In this tutorial, I'll introduce one workflow that I use regularly to create my environment art, which I've titled Canyon Absorption. The workflow will facilitate your way to achieving a great aesthetic result. After that, you should be able to understand and master several aspects of creating environments in Blender including volumetrics, scattering and plenty more.

We'll mainly use Blender, plus Gaea and Adobe Lightroom. Although they're not free, there are always alternative ways that allow you to achieve similar end results. Another of my favourite tools is one of the most practical: Quixel Bridge. It's a library rich in materials, assets and more, but above all it's free. Bridge's arrival has undoubtedly revolutionised the 3D industry.

01 SET UP DISPLACEMENT USING GAEA

Gaea is great when it comes to creating realistic and detailed environments quickly. You can get a starter terrain with little knowledge of the software by going with presets and tweaking each parameter according to your needs. Once you're satisfied with the terrain, you have to export it as an EXR with a Displacement map by pinning the last node before the SatMaps for export. Next do the same thing for the SatMaps in a PNG, which we'll use to add detail in Blender. If you don't have Gaea, you can download my files from the 3D World resources to follow along.

02 DESIGN THE TERRAIN