Low Poly Environment Modeling

It’s time to make some useful landscape assets, such as trees, grass, and rocks. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to make all of those assets, and even how to create multiple variations of them.

This chapter will be good practice for you since there are a lot of simple modeling tasks.

By the end of this chapter, you’ll understand the following:

• How to create simple low poly plants
• How to make low poly rocks
• How to use the Proportional Editing tool

You’ll also have a bunch of completed low poly models.

To start, we’ll go over the specifics of what we’re making.

What we’re making

In this chapter, we’ll be building a lot of small, different projects. Since you’re getting pretty good at navigating Blender, I won’t always name the keys you need to press. I might tell you to go to the Right view or move the top face upward in the Z direction without telling you which keys to press.

You’re getting good at this.

Here’s what we’ll be making. It’s a fairly long list:

• Grass
• A tall tree
• A branching tree
• A rock
• A flat rock
• A flower

For most of these objects, you’ll also learn how to create a few different variations of the model so you don’t have a forest full of totally identical trees or a garden of identical flowers.

We’ll start simple. In the next section, you’ll model grass.

Modeling low poly grass

First, let’s model grass. This will be really simple: we’ll just make a few grass shapes and then duplicate them to make a clump. Then, we can duplicate that clump, edit it a little, and have a whole different clump of grass!

Grass is easy to model. We’re going to start with a cylinder:

1. Press Shift + A and choose Mesh | Cylinder.
2. In the Operator menu, change the Vertices number to 3.

Figure 8.1 – The new cylinder

With only three vertices, this shape is more of a tall triangle than it is a cylinder. This is perfect for making our grass. We’re going to taper this cylinder, then give it a slight bend or curve to make it more organic-looking.

Once we have a single blade of grass, we’ll just duplicate and adjust it a few times to make a clump of grass. When the clump is ready, we’ll make a few copies and adjust them individually to make different clumps.

Then,...

Making low poly flowers

The flowers are very similar to the grass. They won’t be that hard to make; you’ll start with a triangular stem just like the grass, then add a simple squashed icosphere for the bloom.

Make sure you’re back in the Solid View mode (hit Z + 6).

First, add a cylinder. In the Operator menu, change the number of vertices to 3, if it’s not already.

Now you need to thin the cylinder out and taper it, exactly like the grass. The steps are almost identical:

1. Select your cylinder and enter Edit Mode.
2. Hit A to select everything.
3. Hit S to scale everything down smaller. (You don’t want a monster flower stem, so make it pretty thin.)
4. Select the top face of your cylinder.
5. Move it upward along the Z axis to make the cylinder tall.
6. Scale it down to taper the cylinder.
7. Press Ctrl + R and add four new edge loops along the cylinder. These new edges will allow you to add a bit of a curve.

...

Modeling low poly rocks

Rocks are really simple to build—especially low-poly ones. We’re going to make two kinds of rocks: a fairly normal boulder and a flatter one.

The process here is a bit different. You’ll start with a mesh, then mess it up and randomize it. You’ll use the Knife tool to add new edges and vertices, and Proportional Editing to shape it.

Let’s start by making a basic rock shape to build upon.

Creating the basic rock shape

Here’s how you model the basic rock shape:

1. Add an icosphere.
2. In the Operator menu, change the subdivisions to 1, for the simplest possible sphere.
3. Press Tab to go into Edit Mode.
4. Switch to Vertex Select mode.
5. Turn on Proportional Editing by pressing O.
6. Now, you need to flatten the bottom of the sphere. Select one of the bottom vertices and move it upward with G to flatten the bottom of the icosphere. (Don’t worry about making this perfect; just aim for mostly...

Creating low poly trees

“But Samuel, I already made a tree!”

Yes, but the one in Chapter 3 was just to get you started.

The ones we’ll build here are way better. Not more realistic—these are still stylized, low-poly trees. But still, they’re a step up from what you made earlier.

This means they’ll be harder to make, too. So buckle up!

We’re going to make two different kinds of trees: a tall, pointy type of tree, and a wider, branching tree.

Both of these trees will use the same tree trunk, based on a cylinder. This means that you’ll only have to make the trunk once—less work! Let’s begin.

Creating the trunk

Making the trunk is simple. It all starts with a cylinder:

1. Add a cylinder.
2. In the Operator menu, change the vertex number to 8.
3. Press Tab to go into Edit Mode.
4. Press A to select everything, then S to scale it down pretty small, like this:

...

Summary

In this chapter, you created nature itself from nothing at all. You learned how to build different kinds of low poly plants: trees, flowers, and grass. You learned how to make multiple versions of one model.

You made some simple rocks, too.

Good job!

In the next chapter, you’ll enter the complex world of building low poly animals.