How to Make a Magical Forest Scene in BLENDER

In this Blender tutorial, I will share with  you my working process of creating this Magical Forest Artwork, of course, using  our favorite blender and something else, watch this video to the end to learn  more, and don't forget to subscribe. I have Quixel Megascans plants,  ground textures from the same library, and a hero tree for artwork. I often  get asked where to find plant models for Blender. Along with well-known plant  collections such as Botaniq, Vegetation, and the free Plant Library,

I also recommend  checking out the ArtStation marketplace. Here, you can find a variety of high-quality  plant models for Blender, like this one, which I am going to use for this magical forest  artwork, and let`s start with composition. I am copying this tree and pasting it into a new  Blender scene. Based on the design I have created, the tree seems to be positioned on a hill, with  a small path leading to it. To make the terrain look more like hills, I need to create a new  plane. Then scale

it and extrude the edges to model the basic shape of the landscape  and I will return to this object soon. Now we need a camera to see what is happening  in my camera view. I already have a default camera in my scene with basic settings but I  am going to use a fish-eye camera to emphasize the enormous forest space. If we look at my  render once more, it`s a pretty interesting camera effect with some lens distortion  effect which gives such an effect of the large and deep forest. As if the fore

st does  not end at all and extends into the infinity. Let's adjust and rotate the camera to capture  more of the top part. Okay, how to make a fish-eye camera in a blender. It`s easy and everything that  we have to do is change the type of the camera from Perspective to Panoramic and use Fisheye as  a type of camera. Now if we enable the preview render, the camera view looks like a sphere. To  fix this we need to change the focal length but it should still be a wide camera angle, around 15  or

maybe less if you need. I am going to use 18. Well, let`s get back to the landscape.  Let's create a forest surface that is not flat. There are a lot of ways to  reproduce this, but in this scene, I am going to use sculpting tools in a blender. But before, we need to apply the scale because  we made scale adjustments on this plane. Press Shift+A and Apply Scale. Now we can go  to sculpt mode. If I try to do something, nothing happens because we need to subdivide  the mesh to sculpt on the surfac

e. And blender has amazing features - Dynamic Topology which will  subdivide geometry where we will do sculpting. So look at how it works. I enable Dynamic Topology  and set 6 px it`s pretty enough for my goal. Now if I sculpt something Blender subdivide  geometry automatically. It`s an amazing tool, for sculpting landscapes in a blender. I use a  Glay brush to make a form of landscape and create a path to this tree and hills, without  subdivide geometry. Blender subdivides everything and does i

t on the necessary part  of geometry, only where I sculpt a detail. Since I do a static image I can  match everything with a camera view. I am sculpting details only for the  camera view everything behind the camera is not interesting for me and that`s why  Dynamic Topology good fit because I also don`t need a huge density of mesh in those  places that don`t act in the camera view. I think it looks good. Let's  immediately add a part of the forest strip in the background. It seems to  me that th

is may resemble some kind of bowl, which will even emphasize the fish-eye  effect. And now we can fill this area with tree trunks from megascans. Again, fill  the scene and think about composition. My goal is to use all these trunks to  emphasize this direction to the sky. But here we may see some problems. These trunks  are too short. To fix this and make them higher I Enable here Viewport Shading and what I can do.  Select any trunk, for example, this one, and go to Edit Mode, select the last

edges and I am going  to use the Proportional editing tool in Blender to stretch out geometry. But not too much because  as we can see it also stretches the texture though not so visible but it also may bring some  artifacts. I stay here and continue to extrude edge geometry to make them taller. But we can see  it also makes incorrect the texture. To avoid that enable Correct Face Attribute and extrude edges.  Yeah, since the object has unwrapped textures it's also bringing some unpleasant momen

ts, and the  way to avoid that is to change the texture to some tiling texture or cover these places with  leaves. If we look at the render we may see that all these parts of the tree are not visible in  the camera some of them are covered with leaves but other parts just disappear in the light. So,  I can ignore that at this stage. The main thing is that the texture of the object is correctly  stretched without creating visible distortion. Alright, let's discuss how to create a  light effect th

at is similar to the light behind a forest. Firstly, I activate the  preview render to view the actual scene, and then I add a point light as the first light  source, which will be the main light we see in the scene. I move this light to a suitable  position. Additionally, I want this light to be like ambient light, so I increase the size  of this light source to something really large, like 10 or even 20 meters, and move it to  the top part. I also increase the power and change the color to a c

old color. Maybe  something like this. Yeah, that looks good. Now, it seems straightforward. To add  some atmosphere, I'm going to create a new cube in my scene for Volume Fog and  cover the entire scene with it. I need a new material and a Volume material. I've  discussed volume fog in previous videos, so I won't repeat myself. You can watch my  video on the channel where I have provided a link in the description. However, the only  thing I want to mention is that to achieve a more volume effec

t in your scene, we need to  increase the Volume in the render settings. I will move the volume cube slightly to  reveal more atmosphere behind the tree. Next, I want to add a light behind the  forest, where there is currently darkness. To achieve this, I will add a cylinder. I  want to remove some faces from an object, leaving only a specific part that will be used as  a background light. To achieve this, I need to add an emission material to the object and change its  color to match the main l

ight. Also, I would like to adjust the position of this light so that  it appears closer to the horizon and gradually disappears towards the top part. I have a gradient  texture with a color ramp that I will use to achieve my goal. If I turn on the preview, we  can see how the gradient works. I might make some color adjustments closer to the color of my main  light. Now it looks like what I had in mind - a bright light on the horizon of the forest that  gradually fades towards the sky. In combin

ation with point ambient light, it creates a mysterious  forest light. However, it's only a background. And now I want to quickly make grass and fern  to make it look more natural. So, as I said, we need to add trees with leaves to make the  background more like a forest. As we already see those problematic places on the trunks that we  got when scaling geometry are not visible now, but I will additionally cover these places with leaves  so that it looks more natural, like a rather dense forest.

It is also necessary to pay attention  to this horizon line, where I will just add more trees so that this line is not sufficiently  uniform and there is a feeling that the forest does not end here but is blown much further away  from us. Also, we can additionally add variety to the foreground with the help of some bushes  to make our magical forest even more natural. All right. It`s time to add some magic to our  forest. The first is the light on the tree, which highlights some parts of the le

aves and  the main magical light. I'll add Point Light to the scene and position it between the branches so  that it looks like light from the middle of the tree. Make the size bigger to get more soft light  without sharp shadows and increase power. Also, I want to change the color to warm so that brings  some contrast between the cold environment of the forest and the main object. Okay, somewhere like  that. Next, I'll duplicate this light, but with Shift + D because I want to do a different  c

olor and size for this light. Yes. Next, I'll just duplicate that light and place it in  other parts of the tree so that it creates a sense that the world is coming from the middle  of the tree. Good. I can make some of them of a different color and place them in the leaves,  it will give such an interesting shining effect. Next, I want to add light particles as we can  see in my render here. Only some of them will be added in Blender, while the rest will be  used as overlays in Photoshop. First

I add a new sphere. It's going to be this particle.  Let's immediately add Emission material to this sphere with a warm color. In order to  scatter many such particles across the scene, I am going to use the Particle System. To do  this, I need a new sphere that I will place in the same place as the light on the tree and it  will be an emitter for the particle system. Well in the Particle System press the new particle  system and I am going to use Emitter here. Also, we need a Timeline, I'll op

en it here. All  right. In the particle system go to Render and I need to select the sphere which I`ve created  before for light particles. Now if I play an animation, we notice quite small particles here.  Let's make it more noticeable. We see the parts, but they are too small. I'm going to increase  the particle size a little bit, and I'm going to increase the variety of sizes right away.  Immediately I can uncheck the Show Emitter checkbox in order not to see the sphere that I use  as an Emit

ter in the render. If I enable a preview render we may see that these particles have  the same emission material as we added before. Alright. But now all the particles falling  down, and I need them to fly across the stage. To do this, I will go to Field Weights and  remove Gravity to 0.1. This is much better, but we can still remove it to 0.05 to get  more spread effect. So, as we may see, our particles disappeared after some time, because  by default lifetime parameter is set to 50, which mean

s that the particles will exist only  50 frames from the beginning of the animation. My timeline is 250 frames, so I want the  particles to exist in all 250 frames. Okay, now they do not disappear but  fall rather boring. To add more variety, I'll add Turbulence. This force  brings some variation to particles, just increase the strength to 150. So it  already looks interesting, it is possible to reduce the force will be better to 70.  Let's stop in some frames, for example here. It looks great.

I will duplicate this sphere  several times and place it in the leaves. By adding more of these particles, we can  create more magic. Play the animation, and stop on some frame. I think we can slightly  increase the number of particles. Everything seems ok, but I don't like the fact that  these flying lights are quite sharp. So, we can add motion blur. To do this, I enable  Motion Blur in the settings, but I change it to somewhere 0.1. Motion Blur does not work in an  interactive render, so, we

need to make a render. We already see that particles have motion blur.  The particles are slightly blurred depending on the speed of movement of the particles  themselves motion blur will be different for each. So I`ve got this render and I'll open compositing  in a blender because I want to add some Glow using the Glare Node in a blender and change it to Fog  Glow. This adds a soft glow to areas with light, like here. Maybe, a little bit less. Although  no, 8 looks great. After completing all s

tages of work, I can now enhance this render of the  Magic Forest through post-production in Photoshop. But before we make the final touches, I want  to add the last visual effects. I have these overlays with magical effects. I want to add  them to the foreground to emphasize the Magic in this Forest much more. This is easier and  faster to do than using the Particles System in Blender once more. For example, this Overlay with  green particles. I can place it somewhere here in the foreground to

add more dynamics to this  black corner. Even duplicate this layer. Well, let's add these blue particles to the other side  of the image to make this corner alive. And also we can duplicate this layer and move it closer  to the center of the picture. I would add more... something like this, just on the tree. Of course,  using Screen blending mode. Just for light effect. So, great. Combine all layers into one and make  it like a Smart Object because I am going to use a Camera Raw with this layer.

To work with  Camera Raw in Photoshop press Shift+Ctrl+A. I want to reduce Black Point to  get deep black, at the same time, I will raise Shadows so that the shadows  seem not very dark. Perhaps increase a little bit in Highlights. Next, I  want to add Vignette, not too much, but it gives more depth to our artwork.  Camera Raw has an amazing Dehaze which, by the way, works both to add such a fog and to  remove it. Let's leave it that way, I like it. It will be cool to work with colors. Camera R

aw  has some pretty cool tools for Color Grading and local color correction. So I want to raise the  brightness of this yellow. The same applies to orange. Maybe even raises the global Saturation  for the whole picture, so that this is a bright enough magical atmosphere. So pretty good  and next, I want to pull up Luminance for this blue color in the background. This will  add more light to the background. I don't like this green now. It is possible to make it  more greenish. Somehow like this.

So, good. Camera Raw also allows us to work with masks,  so I don`t want to lose an opportunity to use masks. Besides in Camera Raw, we have an  opportunity to paint masks. For example, I create a Brush Mask and I can select this  part by painting the area and slightly raising the exposure to make it brighter. Then I'm  going to add another brush mask and I'm going to highlight these parts where the leaves are  highlighted on the tree, and I'm also going to pull up the exposure. I can select any

part  of the image by drawing a mask with a brush, it`s really amazing tool that allows us to be  flexible in working on the post-production stage. By the way, write in the comments below whether  the tutorials on post-production like Camera Raw or Davinci Resolve for animation would be  interesting for you. Because Blender is super cool and Blender gives a lot of opportunities  even if it does work in Blender only, but Blender does not have such deep tools for  the final production as Davinci

and Camera Raw or Photoshop. So write in the comments  whether you need tutorials on this topic. We're done for today. This is  my final Magical Forest Artwork, I hope you found some useful  information in this video. As usual, some of the files from video tutorials  you can get by subscribing to my Patreon, which also helps my channel. So, thank you  for watching, and see you the next time.