Abstract 3D Wallpaper Blender Tutorial
Things you need:
- Blender (I’m using version 2.7.8 in this tutorial) It’s available on Steam or from Blender.org
- Patience (you will be doing a bit of trial and error)
- Time: 25 minutes to 1 hour + render time (render times will vary based on your hardware)
Step one: Set up a basic scene with a camera and a plane
Basic Blender Scene
You don’t need to worry about setting up a light source yet, that will come later. Make sure your plane fills the entire field of view of your camera. To check what your camera sees, press 0 on your number pad. If your keyboard doesn’t have a number pad, go to view<Camera.
Step Two: Preparing your Plane
Go to edit mode and subdivide your plane.
Subdivide your plane. I’d recommend subdividing your plane 3 or 4 times until it looks like the picture. To subdivide your plane, switch to Edit Mode and then press w and click subdivide.
Step Three: Warping your Plane
You’ll want to have it look something like this.
This can be done a number of different ways for different effects this tutorial will be covering the quickest way. While in edit mode with all the faces in your plane selected on the left-hand side of your Blender window go to the tools tab and click the randomize button a few times. How many is up to you, you’ll want to have a variety of shapes and angles on your plane to create some depth. Feel free to experiment by only selecting a few faces at a time until you’re happy with the results but try to make sure your newly manipulated plane isn’t too complicated as that will ruin the low poly feel.
Step Four: Creating Cubes
Place your cubes in various sizes and distances from the plane
Switch back to object mode and create a handful of cubes, make sure you’ve got some variety.
Step Five: Creating & applying your Materials
Note: Make sure you apply your emission materials only to the faces you want to glow, if you apply the same emission material to all faces of the object it will lose depth. You can get around this by applying a different emission material to each face, but you must remember to compensate to create artificial shading.
Your material node for the bottom face will look something like this.
After you’ve applied your emission materials feel free to switch to a preview render and confirm you are happy with how it looks.For the other faces of your cubes and plane, feel free to experiment! In this tutorial I used a glossy shader with a bit of roughness to give things the surreal touch on the cubes and the plane has a bright white diffuse shader.
Step Six: Render!
You will have to make some changes to the number of samples in your render. The default number will give you a rather grainy image. I usually set my lighting samples around 200-500 and my primary samples around 1000. Feel free to fiddle with these numbers until you find what works best for you :) I hope you enjoyed this Blender tutorial!
Final Render Result!
