Let's start a summer Blender project 🏝

Simplistic stylized environments are great, visually appealing projects. There is so much to learn in this workflow!

This tutorial series originally aired as a livestream for CG Cookie members - now, it's unlocked for anybody to watch.

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We are going to create our tropical Blender island

We will start by creating stylized tress (this video, part 1).

In part 2, we will create simple plants to add to our scene (watch part 2 here).

In part 3, we will create our beautiful sandy stylized beach (watch part 3 here).

Finally, in part 4, we will bring it all together and create our whole island scene (watch part 4 here).

Today, we are making these palm trees!

Here's the result of the 4-part tutorial series

Building simple, stylized environment assets

Above all, this style is super FUN to create. Their simplicity is not only appealing to look at, but it also enables for faster creation compared to their photo-real counterparts.

Link-based Blender workflow

Environments are perfect for using Blender's linking system. The idea being that we create individual .blends for each asset then link them into a new .blend where we assemble the overall environment by duplicating the linked assets and placing them appropriately. The benefit with this is that any changes we want to make to the individual asset .blend files will be applied to the assembly containing links accordingly. It's a crucial function for working on complex scenes like this.

Eevee for large scenes

More often I see Eevee being used for singular objects like characters, vehicles, or small contained environments (sci-fi corridors and single-rooms). So we're going to figure out how to make Eevee work for large-scale scenes.

Want more Blender training? Browse our collection of 30+ free Blender tutorials.