tips n tricks Tips n tricks on making photo-realistic wallpapers

[Marten 628]

Tips 'n' tricks on how to make a photorealistic wallpaper.

Chapter: 1 | Setting up your scene

Spoiler

Getting your scene set up is not hard at all but might be something you will have to play around with a lot.

1. The first thing you'll have to do is to create a ground surface and delete the old ground. You can delete the old ground by navigating to "Project properties > background > [Showground].

2. Find a good seamless ground texture for your wallpaper. (I prefer a dirt texture)

Spoiler

3. Apply the texture to the surface and scale the surface up to something that is more than in sight vision.

4. Rotate the texture 90 degrees so that the bright side is facing up. Then navigate to "Project properties > library > surface" Then change the "Texture vertical repeat" and the "Texture horizontal repeat to the same number you put in as the scale for the surface.

5. Navigate to "Project properties > background settings" and change your sunlight color, ambient color and your fog to what you prefer.

 

Chapter: 2 | Presets/prefabs

Spoiler

So when it comes to objects you wont use many different ones, instead you will repeat the ones you have already made. There for we make "presets" or in Unity language "prefabs".

1. Making a grass preset. When you're making a grass preset, it's all about patterns. There's two very famous patterns that are often used in videogames. I like to call the first pattern for "cross pattern". It's basicly making a cross with two surfaces standing up on its edge. The second one looks like a tic-tac-toe field, so I like to call it the "tic-tac-to-pattern" It's basicly 4 surfaces that's standing in the pattern of a tic-tac-toe field. Last but not least put the surfaces in a folder, then scale down the folder to your perfect size of grass. Here's an image of them from an angle.

2. Making trees and bushes. This is very similar to the grass. But instead of making the a pattern. You keep all of the surfaces at the same place and rotate them to form a sphere-ish shape. 

3. Making 3D-logs. (You can skip this part) When making logs that are actually not built with surfaces, you will need to map a cylinder. This requires an image editing software I recommend paint.NET for a beginner. You will need two images for this log, the side section and the top and bottom section. Make a cylinder and make sure to check "Mapped texture". Now navigate to "Project properties > library > cylinder" and click export map. Open the map in your image editing softwere and scale the width up to 12000, make sure to check "Maintain aspect ratio" and choose "Nearest neighbour" as resampling, that will make the texture 4 times as big which means that every pixel is now 4 pixel and every 4 pixels is 16 pixels, etc etc. Now open both the top 'n' bottom picture and the side picture and simply paste them into places. If you need help with this then PM me.

 

Chapter: 3 | Building your scene

Spoiler

When you're building your scene, you will be using your presets that are already made.

1. Place out the grass where you want it to be. A good way of placing out the grass is to duplicate what you have already placed down, so when you have duplicated it once then select both the grass presets and duplicate them, you should end up with 4. Simply repeat the process until you're happy with it.

2. Planting the trees. When you're placing down the trees it's important to keep these things in mind.

* They are made to fill out the background unless the focus in your wallpaper is a tree.

* Try to not place a tree in front of another tree, that would block a lot of holes in it that we will later use for godrays or simple glows.

* Don't only position them, rotate them aswell. If every tree is facing the exact same direction then the wallpaper wont look realistic. You can even rotate them sideways so they are tilting.

3. Details and buildings? It's not bad to place some details here and there but too many can look your wallpaper look complicated and wont make it pleasing for your eyes. And dont import Minecraft shematics, tools or blocks. I've never seen those in real life.

Chapter: 4 | Camera and rendering

Spoiler

Positioning the camera is not as easy as it sounds. You need to make sure that there's no highly visable sharp edges inbetween the grass and the ground.

Depth of field is not very important. Only if you want the camera to focus on something in the background, otherwise try to avoid using it.

You can tilt the camera to give it some interesting effects.

When you are rendering the wallpaper, I would recommend you to render 4k and scale it down if you want it to be 1920x1080, or you can keep it at 4k.

Read more about rendering and positioning the camera here ⇲

All credits goes to @Voxy.

 

Chapter: 5 | Editing

Spoiler

Editing is the part where you have to play around with the most.
If you want to edit in paint.NET then I would suggest you to download some plugins and find a tutorial on how to install them. Because without plugins, paint.NET is basicly nothing. You can find some good plugin packs here. ⇲

                                                                          http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/forum/44-plugin-packs/

The first thing you probably want to change in the image is the colors and the contrast. Simply navigate to "Adjustments > curves+... > Choose RGB instead of Luminosity", and start playing with the curves, spend around 5 - 20 minutes trying to perfect your color-theme and click "OK". Now navigate to "Adjustments > brightness / contrast" and adjust the contrast as you'd like it. I like to higher the contrast just a little to make the details a little more visable.

Now it's time to add some filters. You're not meant to go overpowered with one filter unless you know that you're following that specific theme. A good filter to start of with is the glow filter. The glow filter is inbuilt in the original paint.NET and is accessible in "Effects > photo".

Now improvise and try to follow a theme. The theme can be dark, sunny, (insert color here), etc etc. Remember!

Godrays can be achieved by drawing a blurry line from holes in the trees. Read more about godrays here ⇲

All credits goes to @AbAppletic.

 

Fun fact: Rocket league used the tic-tac-toe-pattern in their menu screen to make the grass.

Edited June 4, 2016 by Marten Studios

[Skjold 7.6k]

. Just .

 

This is great.

[GbStudio 1.6k]

Thank you. Sadly I knew most of this. Making grass is pretty easy if one was ever into 3d game developing.

Edited June 2, 2016 by GbStudio

[Zeno 2.9k]

"wow this guy must be a professional"

srs

 

(cool tut tho)

[Marten 628]

38 minutes ago, Deminu said:

"wow this guy must be a professional"

srs

 

(cool tut tho)

Y'know what I mean.

[AbAppletic 446]

Really nice. Amazing. I can't... I just can't getting my mouse away from the like button

[12bly 477]

Oooohh paint.net has PlUG1ns  good tut!