From the course: Pixel Playground

Create a tranquil landscape: Build the structure

From the course: Pixel Playground

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Create a tranquil landscape: Build the structure

- [Instructor] What we're going to do in this next couple of weeks, is to create a tranquil, serene landscape. Landscape with some trees and a little path going through the woods and a lake in the background, a nice little scene. Now the first thing we need to do is establish what the scene looks like. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a new layer right here and I'm going to call that layer sketch. There we go. And using black and a nice hard edge brush, let's get this nice and hard and really small, a little tiny brush, I'm going to go in here and start to sketch out my scene. So I'm going to have a little landscape area right here. I'm going to draw a little shape. Ah, maybe we'll just come a little wider, there we go, and then suddenly dip and come back up into here. Let's close this up. There we go. And there's going to be a little path coming off right off in here, it's going to come in 'about like that, come towards us. Ah, little path is just getting little wider and goes off like that. Then there'll be a big tree right here. There's going to be a big tree right in this area here. Big tree. And then there'll be some shrubs visible in back through here, some nice shrubs. This is just a rough sketch to give us an idea of where things are going to go. There's going to be another tree right here, it's going to be kind of leaning in a little bit. Leaning right into the air like that. And then put a tree in the background right say back here. Just a little further back, a little tree right back there. Alright, there's the tree. Now there's going to be a shoreline back here. We're going to have another shoreline right through there with some shrubs on top and maybe a tree way off in the background like that, just like that, and this is going to be a lake. This area right here will be a lake, in fact, we'll even call it that. Lake. Alright. So now that we got our basic structure in place and we can kind of refine this if we want, bring this up a little bit, the land, and so on, we can now start working on our actual elements. Now I'm going to bring down the opacity for this layer considerably 'cause it's just our sketch layer, so I'm going to bring down it's opacity. Just bring it down, bring it down, way down, so there's just this little hint of where things are going to go. And it's its own layer so it doesn't matter, it's not going to print. It's just a rough guide of where things going to happen. Now the first thing we're going to do is the trees themselves. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to create my first layer. I'm going to call this tree1. Okay, and that's going to be the guy over here. So now to create my tree I'm going to go into my filters, come down here to Render, and choose Tree. Now tree is going to come up and there it is. There's our tree. But we don't want that kind of a tree. So we'll go over to the base type and we look and we see we have a lot of different kinds of trees. So I'm going to pick something like this pine tree right here, Pine Tree 1, I like that. And there you can see that it's going to create our little pine tree, there it is. That's what it looks like. We can bring the height of the branches down a little bit, so it comes down a little further like that, or we can bring them way up here, just see how it looks. Bring way up and there's big trunk down below. But now we'd want to bring it way down so there's just a little bit a hint of a little trunk down there. There we go. So we have this tree and everything's looking pretty good. Light direction, let's have the light coming from say the other direction here, there we go, so it's more like almost straight on with us, right there. And maybe bring it little more centered, there we go, little centered light there, and the leaves amount we can use that many leaves, that's good. Leaves size, we can maybe make 'em a little bit smaller just so we have smaller leaves there right in there like that. And we go ahead and say do it. And it creates a tree right there. Then I'm going to create another layer behind it and we'll call this one tree2. And I'm going to hit command, option, F, to bring up the dialog box. Now I'm going to set this up right here, randomize the shapes. See? See how it just changed the shape? Then I'm going to click OK and we'll have tree number two and then one more for three number three. Command F this time and it'll automatically create that third tree. Now they're all on the exact same spot, so we need them to be in these particular areas, so I'm going to take tree number one and I'm going to move him over, let's bring him over into here. Now let's pull back a little bit, 'cause that's the tree that's really closest to us and it's going to be pretty big. So what I'm going to do is put it down and then enlarge it. I hit command T to bring up the controls for the transform controls and I'm going to go in there and let's make it larger and put it right into this area here and let's bring it so it's just about coming off the image, but like that. There's our first tree right there. Kind of nestles into that corner. Okay, tree number two, that's this guy in the background there. So we're going to go in there and take that guy and bring him in there and take number three and put him in place right there for now. Tree number two, we're going to go in there and let's just shrink this one down. Command T to bring up the transform and I'm going to shrink him down a little bit like that and put him right back in there, right in there like that. There's our other little tree back there. Shrink a little more, that gives a little bit of trunk over that little landmass there. Click OK and then this last one here, well he's tilting in a little bit. Let's go, tree number three, hit command T, and I'm going to rotate it a little bit and make it a little bigger and kind of put him into position right about there like that. In fact, we might even... Yeah, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to do a little flip, horizontal line like that. Just going to drag it over so that that nice branch that's coming out there will kind of cut across this area here. There we go, there's our third tree. Okay. So now that we have all that in place, what we're going to do next is to start to create the ground cover. So let's go see what this ground cover's going to look like. That's this area right in here, right? So, I'm going to get my paint brush, there's my paint brush, and I'm going to choose a brush like one of these guys, the spatter brushes, I'm going to go with this one right here 'cause he's got a couple little clusters in his center, which right now is going to give us that, okay? So, let's go in here and create a new layer and we're going to put it in front of two and three because layer one, this first tree, is in front, right? And possibly this guy too, so let's put it right in front of layer, let's put it in front of two. Right there, in front of two. Okay? And we're going to modify our brush so it gives us what we want 'cause right now it does that. So I'm going to go into our brush engine right here and I'm going to increase the spacing for that brush just to give us a little space in there so now we can see each distinct tip as it applies, see? There they are. Now I'm going to close it up a little bit, 'about like that, maybe a little tighter, and I'm going to go into Shape Dynamics where I want to see jitter to size. Randomize the size of those tips as they get laid down. Then I'm going to go way down here to angle and completely push it to 100% percent. Now you can see how each tip is spinning around so now we have a totally random looking stroke. Then I go into Color Dynamics where I'm going to see the foreground and background give me a jitter between the two. Each tip, Apply Per Tip, each tip is going to have a different color based on the foreground and background. Then I say give it a little bit of a jitter shift and we'll give it a lot of saturation shift and brightness shift. Again, this is going to randomize each tip is going to have different parameters set. So now we pick out colors. So we can close this guy down and let's go in here and pick up a nice green. Let's say we pick up a green 'about like that. And then for the background color, I'll pick a similar green but much darker, say down into this area here. There we have the foreground and background. So now in a new layer, we'll call this layer ground cover, and I start to draw. And I'm just going to go in here and start to cover up all these little areas and you can see how it's shifting between the different tones. And we can just very quickly fill this all up. Right in there like that. There we go. It's got a very random kind of a look to it. We come back here and let's make the brush a little smaller, little bit smaller, and we'll kind of start to draw a little shoreline area back in here, right in there. Just kind of fill that all up, right in there, and we can start to make our brush a little bigger and we start to finish off this area, just like that. And we fill it in. Now that third tree, kind of like to have that inside the foreground, so we're going to just change its position. It is in its own layer so it's real easy to do that. There we go. Okay, nice and full. So we're going to take that tree number three and put it in front of the ground cover, there it is, it just came up. So now the next thing we're going to do is we're going to go in here and add us some flowers. So I'm going to change my colors. Let's go to a nice red, a nice bright red like that, go to a darker version of that same red, say about like that, and in the layer, on top of the ground cover, we'll say flowers. And we'll just kind of throw a couple in there. I'm going to bring down the size of my brush a little bit and just kind of throw a couple in there in a couple of spots. Now let's get closer 'til we see what's going on here. And we're just going to fill up a couple little areas with these little flowers. Kind of like a Bob Ross scene, so these are happy little flowers there, moving along here. Just throw a couple in the foreground and a couple on this side too. And we got a couple of different flowers. So what we're going to do is change our colors to a nice bright yellow, that's a good one, and let's say a slightly deeper yellow, there we go, and we'll throw some more flowers but this time some yellows and I'm going to bring the opacity down to about say 50, so they're not going to be too strong. And we're just kind of throw in a couple of little hints of these other colored flowers right through there. Okay. It's adding a lot of variety to our little bushes too as you can see. So I go over here and we start to throw all these guys into these areas like so. Alright, so there's our ground cover starting to get there. So now, these two trees. Let's go in there and look at these trees. I'm going to take this first tree here, tree number one, and I'm going to go into my hue saturation and kind of darken 'em a little bit and bring up it's saturation just a little, like that, just to make him a little darker and the one back here, I'm going to just take my burn tool. Let's go to tree number three and I'm going to just kind of darken, that's a little too strong. Let's set to 50 and the Shadows I'll set it to Midtones and bring it down to about a 20 and just kind of slightly darken the sides of it like that, just in there like that. Now get in closer and we need to have a I'm going to hit F to give me full screen here, I'm going to move it over, and we're going to get a little closer. Tree number three right there, I'm going to give it a mask. Give it a mask. And then using black which will hide and my brush with that same tip, I'm going to go in there and make that brush real smaller and kind of just dab it in a couple spots at a 100%, dab it and you can see that now we're kind of making the tree look like it's just coming out of the bushes there. Yes, keep that up there, there we go. Same thing for tree number one. We give it a mask and using black we would just kind of let some of those little flowers and stuff kind of show through and you get the feel that that tree is now coming out of the brush as well. See? So there. Now that we have this, what we're going to do is next week we're going to start adding some shrubs and the ground. So I'll see ya next week.

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