As I hope you've noticed over the course of this book, it's not just about EEVEE. It's about making renders look great and look great fast. The bulk of the workflows and tips and tricks are about EEVEE, but there's also so much value in feeling like you can use EEVEE to make something that won't require you to sit in front of your computer for months and agonize over every single detail. The idea is to give you the tools to create something amazing, not just provide rote knowledge about the technical details of EEVEE. That's why I want to give you knowledge of Geometry Nodes, alphas, the Asset Browser, and more because EEVEE can't reach its full potential without further knowledge. So, in that spirit, in this chapter, we're going to learn about kitbashing, which is a way to add more visual interest by recycling smaller pieces of geometry to give life to an otherwise boring model. This way, it's easy to build a library of parts to mix and match for each scene that you work on.
In this chapter, we'll look at kitbashing and then look at some other ways to increase the overall quality of this project, without sacrificing a lot of time. We will cover the following topics:
As usual, either download the Chapter 11-Start.blend file from the GitHub repository for the book, or take your previous Chapter 10-End.blend file and keep working on what you had. If you choose to work on the file you previously created while working through Chapter 10, Working with Irradiance Volumes and CubeMaps for Accurate Rendering, download the extra_objects.blend file and import the Details collection and SquareDetails subcollection into your file. We're going to be using these extra objects as details to add to the main objects, so make sure they're in your scene.
The supporting files for this chapter can be found here:
https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Shading-Lighting-and-Rendering-with-Blenders-EEVEE/tree/main/Chapter11
When working through a scene, I often like to work from the big details down to the small. After sorting the camera composition, adding the large objects to the scene, and setting up the lighting, it's now time to add little aspects that really make the scene realistic. We've done this before in the previous mini-project where we added alphas to the environment. In this section, we're going to take small, basic objects and add them to the main objects we've already defined. Let's get to work:
Now we're going to add a Vertex Weight map, just like we did in Chapter 5, Setting Up an Environment with Geometry Nodes, where we used it to specify where the plants and rocks would be scattered on the landscape. For this object, we're going to use the Vertex Weight map to tell Blender how we want the object to be interpolated with others. Let's start by going to the Object Data Properties panel in the right-hand Properties panel.
Now, when we move to Weight Paint mode, the object should be entirely red, which signifies that the whole object is set to a weight of 1. What we want is for the edges of our object to be red, but the inside of our object to be blue, with a gradient in between those two extremes. Luckily, Blender gives us a gradient tool to achieve this, so we don't have to try painting this effect by hand.
Then, change the Gradient type from Linear to Radial, Radial being a circular gradient, which is exactly what we need. Make sure Weight is set to 0.000 as well. We want to start painting in the center of the circle with a weight of 0, and increase the weight as we get closer to the edges of the circle.
With the gradient smoothly transitioning from blue to red, it's now easy to take this Weight Paint map and use it to influence the Shrinkwrap modifier we'll add to the object. The Shrinkwrap modifier takes one object and, exactly as the name suggests, shrink-wraps it onto another object. We'll add this modifier to the Circle002 object and then tweak the outcome so we get the best possible result.
If you're still in Weight Paint mode, change back to Object mode. You should still have the Circle002 object selected. If we go to the Properties panel, and then to the Modifier Stack, we can add a Shrinkwrap modifier by clicking on the Add Modifier button and then selecting Shrinkwrap from the available options.
If you look at our object now, it looks pretty terrible... The Shrinkwrap Modifier is trying to move our geometry to the spaceship object, but it's a little too far away to look realistic.
The overall result is a very flexible piece of geometry that we can use again and again to create lots of detail in the span of a couple of minutes.
Copying the Circle002 object and adding it to the nose of the spaceship adds detail to a ship that might look a little simple otherwise, avoiding the pain of trying to add the details directly to our original geometry. This is also a very flexible technique – if your director doesn't like a certain detail, you don't need to remodel the spaceship or try and break pieces off of the mesh, as the details are separate from the spaceship and can be changed or deleted easily. And the beauty of mechanical parts is that they are often reused over and over again, so it makes sense to do this in our scene.
Try taking the other parts that I modeled and preparing them with the correct Vertex Maps. Then, using the Asset Browser methodology that we covered in Chapter 5, Setting Up an Environment with Geometry Nodes, mark them as assets and add them to your Blender_Assets folder that we set up to store our Asset library. Now, you can import any detail into your scene and add it to any object anywhere in no time at all. Now that we've gone through this first method, let's move on to another method for adding detail quickly using small objects. We'll be using Geometry Nodes to achieve a similar purpose as before, but for larger areas.
To finish up this chapter, we'll create a sci-fi panel to put on the blank wall to the left of the spaceship. I've taken the simple geometry that I've prepared and placed in the Square Details collection, but feel free to model some of your own. My rule of thumb for designing larger panels is that the details need to fit together, so squares are obviously the simplest shape that fit together readily into larger panels. We'll take these pieces and create a random configuration out of them so that we get the illusion of a meticulously modeled panel. So, let's move on to the instructions:
And we now have a really simple, but complex-looking, sci-fi panel that we can tweak using the Geometry Nodes modifier to get the exact formation we want.
In this section, we worked through another application of Geometry Nodes, this time to create a machine panel incorporating some randomization but constraining the scattering to a more ordered grid formation. You can now see how truly amazing Geometry Nodes are, and should feel compelled to further your knowledge so you can create even more complicated procedural structures in Blender.
In this chapter, we took two different approaches to add small details to the spaceship and its hangar to make the scene look much more detailed and effective than what we would get by modeling and placing every single detail manually. First, we created small details that can be applied to different sections of the spaceship with a Shrinkwrap modifier. The other technique involved using Geometry Nodes to create a grid-based patterned panel that we can randomize at will. The scene I ended up with looks like this:
Of course, you can spend as much or as little time as you want on adding more details, modeling your own additions to the scene, and taking it as far as you want to. Adding signs or pieces of text could be really cool for this scene, and you could also consider adding more complicated pieces of detail to the sci-fi panel. I just wanted to show you what is possible and give you the tools to take it further and make your artwork better, faster.
After working through this chapter, you should understand the importance of using small mechanical-style objects and being able to duplicate and scatter them for a really intricate visual effect. The next chapter is one of the most fun chapters in this book: How to create fire with EEVEE!