3 Easy steps to make Realistic Materials

nothing in the real world is ever Perfect all objects have scratches rust dirt and other imperfections over time these imperfections build up in specific ways and it's these imperfections that help tell a story if you want your audience to immediately get a feel for the worlds that you're creating the objects in your worlds need to reflect that story in this video I'll show you the three most common types of imperfections and how to create them so that all the objects in your renders can contribute to the the story you're trying to tell for this tutorial I'm going to be using what's known as a Shader ball it's a unique type of 3D model that specifically has a lot of curved surfaces and bevel edges to test your materials on this Shader ball was designed by teterin but they've made it freely available so you can download this model and the final material from my gumro page Link in the description let's start by setting up the base materials we'll be working with for this tutorial we'll keep it relatively simple and use a metal material as the base and put a coat of paint over the top of it all of the procedural nodes that we'll create later will be used to chip away at the paint revealing the metal underneath but keep in mind that you can layer any number of materials over the top of each other to create even more complex results slide open a new window change it to the Shader editor select the Shader ball and click new to create the first material node since I know we'll want a metal and paint material I'll immediately duplicate this principal Shader and move it up the metal material will be very simple here since we won't really see that much of it in the end just turn the metallic to one lower the base color to a light gray and adjust the roughness to suit we'll see a little more of the paint material so I want to add a little more variety in the color you'll notice a lot in this tutorial that I use a few keyboard shortcuts these shortcuts come as part of the node Wrangler add-on which for some reason still isn't enabled by default if it's not already enabled go to your edit preferences menu go to the add-ons Tab and search for node and make sure that the node Wrangler add-on is enabled you can now use the shortcut control shift and left click on a node to preview it in the viewport add a noise texture a color ramp and a mix color node plug the noise into the color ramp and the color ramp into the factor of the mix node so you can see the results really clearly I'm going to add two wildly different colors into the A and B slots if we preview this you can see that we're getting both of these colors mixing together randomly you can adjust both the noise texture and the color ramp to suit your material now personally I always push the black and white values on the ramp closer together to create more contrast and increase the scale detail and roughness of the noise texture odds are you don't actually want these two colors to be this extreme so I'm going to go with an orange color and make one slightly lighter and the other slightly darker if you connect the mix color into your material base color you'll now see that the paint layer has a bit of variation which adds a nice healthy dose of realism to your objects adjust the roughness to determine what kind of paint this is lower the roughness if you want shiny paint in my case I know that the metal underneath is going to be quite shiny so I'm going to go with a more matte finish to the paint to add some additional contrast we can now add a mix Shader and connect both the paint and metal materials to it using the factor allows us to slide back and forth between them but what we really want is to add some imperfection details into this Factor so that we can make it look like the paint has been chipped Away by Nature the edges of objects can take quite a beating they get dropped bumped chipped and over time all of these imperfections build to what's known as Edge wear now trying to hand paint every single edge on an object could be an overwhelming task fortunately blender has some built-in tools to help us create these procedurally so you'll only ever need to create this setup once to be able to reuse it over and over again there's a few different setups that can create Edge wear and sometimes one method will give better results depending on the model if you're using Cycles you'll be able to use any of these methods if you're using Eevee the bevel node and the pointiness nodes won't work I'll be using Cycles in this video so I can show all of them to you but just keep in mind that you'll want to use the ambient occlusion method if you're using Eevee for this model the bevel node setup has given me the best results so let's set one up create two bevel nodes a mixed color and a color ramp plug the two bevel nodes into the mix node and the mix into the ramp set the mix node to difference and set the factor to one set the ramp to constant and drag the white value almost all the way back to the black the position value should be really low something around 0 .01 this setup works by comparing the two bevel nodes and finding the difference between them so set the lower bevel node radius to zero and the top one to a very small value something like 0.002 gives me good results this is a great start but the edges are extremely clean we want to ruffle them up a bit so the damage looks a lot more random create a noise texture and another color ramp get used to creating color ramps we're going to be making a lot of them you can mix the bevel setup and the noise together using a mixed color node making sure to set it to multiply and cranking the factor all the way up turn up the scale detail and roughness on the noise texture and plug it into the color ramp I like to add a bit more contrast so I'll drag both the black and white values more towards the center of the ramp feel free to adjust the noise and color ramps to determine just how much you want to eat away at these edges if we plug this mix node into the factor on the mix Shader we can now see that our final Shader is starting to take shape with the paint looking like it's being chipped away to the reveal the metal underneath feel free to experiment with both the ambient occlusion and the pointiness set up as well I found that the bevel setup works really well for objects with lots of sharp edges the ambient occlusion works better for surfaces with more curves and the pointiness setup is best suited for organic models such as high poly sculpts I'll often use this method to extract extra details such as scales or wrinkles and of course you can mix any of these together to create even more complex results but to keep it simple I'm going to stick with the bevel setup for this tutorial The Edge wear is looking really nice but now I want to break up these larger surf surfes these larger areas are more exposed than the tight little edges and as such they're more likely to have other objects drag across them so let's add some procedural scratches to simulate this creating a cracked surface is really easy to do in blender just create a veroni texture and set the second drop down to distance to Edge I'm also going to add some mapping nodes to the vector which will help us in a moment the shortcut to add these is contrl T use the object slot which gives us a few more cracks to play with in this case say want our cracks to be white to mix back into our Edge wear later so it create a color ramp flip the colors and drag the black value back down really low something around 01 this looks good but there's a lot of cracks we want to mask away some of these so that we're left with only a handful the best way I found to do this is to duplicate the veroni texture and set the type back to the default which is F1 because the Veron eyes are using the same scale and therefore a very similar mathematical model this second veroni is a kind of smoothed out version of our cracks if you add another color ramp and crush the values closer together you can really see how the cracks line up to the smooth version of our circular shapes if we now take both of these ramps and multiply them together with a mixed color node we can use the second texture to slowly cut out some of our cracks and they'll align perfectly now to make sure that both of these Veron eyes stay in sync it may be worth adding a simple value node and plugging it into both scale slots set the value to somewhere around 10 finally as good as these cracks are looking I'd like to add a little more Randomness to their shape we can do this by plugging just about any random value into the mapping node in this case I'm going to use a musk grave texture and plug the height into either the location or the rotation either will work as it's just kind of adding some Randomness into the equation if you want even more Randomness you can plug it into both we now have some nice scratches which we can mix back into the edge wear from earlier so add another mix node and set it to add to combine these masks plug this new mask into the factor on the mix sh Shader to see both the edge wear and the cracks now if your cracks are a little difficult to see you can go back and adjust the color ramps to make them a little thicker I've also found this is a really good time to add a bump node as this really helps bring out the cracks so add a bump node and plug the edge wear and cracks mix into the height of the bump and the normal into the normal of the metal material on a bump node the white values make the Surface look raised while the black values push it into the surface now at the moment that means that our cracks are actually pushing up so hit the invert button on the bump node to flip this and push the cracks and Edge wear down into the surface you can then adjust the strength to determine how deep you want the scratches to be around 2 seems to be a good value here this is all looking great but I want to add one last layer of completely random damage across everything this is really simple after everything else that we've done just create a noise texture and add a color ramp plug them together and adjust the settings for some random black and white values add a Final Mix node set to add and join this random noise with the edge wear and scratches that we've already created plug this final value into the mix Shader as well as the bump and see the final results come to life that finishes off our procedural metal material with Edge wear scratches and random damage but there's one last procedural trick that I'd like to leave you with let's add some dirt to this sucker before adding dirt let's quickly clean up this mess of nodes a little bit using some frames I'll create a frame for the edge wear the cracks the damage and the color setups grab all the nodes and drag them into the frame the frame will automatically resize to fit all the nodes you can also name these frames and increase the label size to make them easier to read there that's much easier to understand I want the dirt to start at the bottom of the model almost as if it's been sitting on the ground accumulating Gunk then slowly Fade Out as we get higher and higher up the model for this we'll want to use a gradient texture add a texture coordinates and a mapping node using the control T shortcut and set the coordinates to object keep in mind that this setting relies on the values in your object's transforms so make sure that your model is in the center of the world and apply the transforms to ensure all these values are set back to default this should give you a nice gradient going straight through the middle of your model but it's rotated the wrong way so let's flip that around using the Y rotation on the mapping node set this to -90 you can then use the X location to move the gradient up and down the object as per usual I want to create a color ramp at the end of this set up to further control the contrast I'm going to set this to constant and bring the white value down this is great we've now got a dirt line that we can play with but I want to roughen it up and randomize it a bit so create another noise texture with a color ramp and join them together and adjust both to your liking what I really want now is to find a way of blending between the object's mapping here and this new Randomness that we've created so create another mix node and plug the color ramp into the top and the mapping node into the bottom set the mix node to add and crank the Factor all the way up we'll then plug this random mapping back into the gradient texture which will still give us that dirt line but it's now roughened up let's put this whole setup into its own frame labeled dirt we can now use this new mask that we've created to layer a new color on top of our paint material duplicate the mixed color node with the original paint colors and plug the old colors into the top slot and add a brown color to the bottom slot and then we can use our new mask as the factor this will add dirt colors on top of the paint paint and to add to the effect we can plug this dirt mask into a bump node and plug that into the normal slot of our paint material this will raise the dirt layer slightly making it look like the dirt is on top and this here is our final Shader don't forget that you can download this model and the procedural material from my gumro page now feel free to try your new material out on a bunch of different objects and take joy in knowing that because it's a procedural material you'll never have to hand paint these imperfections again as I mentioned earlier some of these nodes such as the pointiness node or the bevel nodes don't work in Eevee however you can bake them out into texture images which does allow Eevee to render them so if you'd like to learn how to do that jump on over to this next video

Channel: Jamie Dunbar

Views: 189,856

Keywords: Blender, 3D, tutorial, material, beginner, cycles, eevee, metal, paint, scratches, edge wear, grunge, damaged, procedural

Id: hAWLqRpzK6I

Length: 12min 20sec (740 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 04 2023