Advanced Materials in Blender 2.80 | Shader Editor Tutorial

hey guys and welcome to another very exciting blender tutorial now who wants a wooden dragon or a dragon made from glass how about a marble glass dragon with bright outline and some green moss where the Sun doesn't shine no matter what you fancy in this tutorial I want to show you how to create some more advanced materials in blender 2.80 using the powerful shader editor the shader editor gives you access to a node based workflow that lets you create fully customized shaders for any material that you can possibly imagine now this is going to be an intermediate tutorial and I will assume that you are familiar with the basics of blender and the basics of how materials work if you new to everything I've got some beginner Teutons on my channel I'm going to drop you those links down into the video description so be sure to check that out before you come back here but now before anything else drops out of the sky let's jump right into the tutorial welcome to the exciting world of blender now this is just the default blender scene but I have already imported to the model that we're going to be using it's called the Stanford dragon which is a 3d scan of an actual dragon figurine you can grab this model for free directly off the Stanford University website so you simply come into Google and search for the Stanford dragon or you know in the video description I'll just drop your link to this file as well come down on their website and you'll find the dragon itself now you want to download the V ripped reconstruction which is an STL file so it's a zip file about 11 megabytes once you've downloaded and extracted that file you can then come into blender come in to file import import an STL file and then you'll be able to import that directly into your scenes I've already got it loaded here I was just getting a little bit sick of the monkey and I thought this dragon just looked really cool it'll be nicer to see some of the details of the materials that we're going to be working with as well right now in the properties panel in the render tab my render engine is set to Eevee and I'm going to switch this over to cycles which is blenders ray-tracing render engine Eevee is great if you want to work fast get quick previews of you know preview animations and stuff like that but for realism and quality you definitely want to switch over to the cycles when the engine I'm also going to switch my device over to GPU compute to leverage the GPU acceleration due note that for that to work you need to go to your preferences and under the system settings make sure that you have queued enabled if you have an Nvidia graphics card CUDA is Nvidia's proprietary framework for GPU acceleration if you have an AMD graphics card you can use OpenCL which does the open-source equivalent also if you are blender 2.81 or above and have an nvidia r-tx graphics card you can also enable optics which gives you an additional performance boost for rate rays rendering but now let's return to our dragon and let's switch the viewport shading over to rendered up here in the top right hand corner and that's what our dragon figurine looks like right now now the lighting is pretty bad so I'm actually going to delete this default line so let's just select it X let's delete that and we could set up some elaborate lighting but I'm actually just gonna use an environment texture on HDR I instead that then provides the light so in our properties panel on the right hand side that's coming to the world tap under the surface which is the background which is just this gray right now it's set to backgrounds and the colors just a solid gray let's click on this little dot here on the right side of the color which will bring up the options of what we can connect to this color channel I'm gonna select environment texture and perfect let's just roll with that maybe not let's come over to the right hand side let me just make this panel a little bit bigger and down underneath in Varma texture let's hit open to actually load an HDR I and the one I'm going to be using is called circus arena underscore 4k which I got from HDR I Haven again a file that you can use for free to go to find a link to that in the video description so let's double click on that and load that in and there you go so you now got this HDR I load it in of a circus arena and it provides the really nice lighting very soft lighting all around for this dragon figurine now I find the background itself a little bit distracting so I'm going to come to the render tab in my properties panel and let's expand film and under film there's an option to enable transparent background and it's going to take the background away but we still get this really nice lighting from this HDRI so that actually looks really cool let's select the dragon and down in the properties panel let's come almost all the way down to this little circle here was just a material tab let's select that and right now our dragon has no material assigned so just get this really basic default shader happening right now let's hit new to add a new material this is rename this one to drag an underscore matte and let's check out what we can do with this shader now during the development of blender 2.8 they've introduced a principle to be SDF and BSD F stands for bi-directional scattering distribution function which is the really technical term for how this shader works but it's essentially a physically based shader that will essentially replicate a lot of the properties of materials as they happen in real world when objects interact with rays of light now it also combines a whole bunch of different things it makes it really easy to customize your material without having to go into the shader editor which will dive into just a little bit but most of the options are accessible directly available in this shader tab and they're super easy to customize so for example you have a base color which right now is just set to white in Venice options for subsurface which is essentially the color of an object underneath the surface you can create transparent materials for example exchange the subsurface color over to something maybe a little bit green like a dark green or something let's bring up this subsurface value here so what we're telling blender is that now the Rays cannot penetrate into this object and underneath the surface it's kind of green so it's like this white on the outside and then it's green on the inside and because it's a little bit translucent like some of that color will come shining through it's great for things like marble and skin let's just take the subsurface back down you can make the object a little bit metallic which can't get sisters really nice shine and if you want more specularity you can bring down things like the roughness just lower this and you're getting this really shiny metallic object specularity there's a ton of stuff that you can tweak right here let me just bring the roughness back up and metallic can go down a little bit and quite honestly you do a helluva just with these settings in the material tap transmission you can make it emit light you can connect all sorts of things up to it also note that all these feels all of these channels of properties have this little circle on the right-hand side and if you click on that you can actually let me scroll up with my mouse wheel a little bit there's a lot of other options hidden here at the top you can actually connect images other shaders other things a whole bunch of technical functions into these properties to control them with much more detail and yes you can kind of do that in this panel but this is when I feel the shader editor really gives you the full power and visibility over what you're doing and so let's dive into that let's come up to the top of the 3d viewport right here at the top part of this horizontal line is right click select to split areas and that's going to allow me to split my view if you press tap let's switches over to a horizontal split click in the middle so when our split our 3d view in the top one I'm going to come up into the top left hand side and let's change the editor type over to the shader editor and this is now the shader editor we press n to hide this little panel here on the right hand side and zoom in so the shader editor essentially gives you a node based workflow for managing materials and you can build extremely complex shading graphs with tons and tons of nodes to create some really complex and really amazing looking shaders now the one we're going to create in this to trial probably isn't terribly functional but I just want to show you how this works and the potential of all the cool stuff you can do with it so right now our shader graph is actually really simple we have the principled psdf shader and the left hand side here and the output of that shader simply goes into the surface properties of whatever we have in this material assigned to if you click onto this little green connector here for the surface you can reconnect the output of this principal PSD FF I'll just let go anyway the object is not fully black because well it's the dragon has this dragon material assigned which by the way in our shaded editor at the top you've got a little drop-down right now we have this dragon material selected if you have other materials you can select them here and switch between them but this is represents the material that's currently assigned to the dragon which because it's not connected is black let's take the output of the DSD f click on to this little green connector drag it over to the material output and connect it to the surface and now the output of the principal psdf Shera is applied to the surface of this material again and again we can see our dragon now let's do something really cool let's add other nodes into this graph and connect them up to create something a little bit more exciting now in the shader editor just like anywhere else in blender you can press shift & a to add and in here you can add a whole bunch of different nodes for input types outputs a whole bunch of different shaders textures colors controls converters and this keeps growing there's lots of really cool stuff that they're adding in here now let's add a different shader let's say we wanted our dragon to have a bit of a glassy look so let's come into the shader here I'll write inside and let's pick the glass psdf select that that'll give you this little note that you can now drop down let's drop it into the graph and this represents a glass shader and we can now take the output of this glass shader and plop it into the surface of our material and suddenly our dragon is glass because right now we only have the glass shader connected to the output now you can change the eye or are to kind of control how this glass looks was gonna lower it maybe just a little bit to make the glass a little bit less refracting so there's a little bit less distortion happening it's a little bit easier to see that it is actually glass but let's say I wanted to combine this glass shader with our base shader and hmm there's lots of different ways to combine them okay let's say we just want to blend between the two for that blender has something called a mix shader' note again in the shader editor make sure you're over that shift & a to add a new shader or by the way you can also come to the menu here at the top and go at let's go shader and one on a pick is a mix shader and this note allows me to mix shaders together let's select the mix shader' let's drop that into our graph actually I might move that above right here now what I want to do is I actually want to mix between my glass and my principal psdf shaders so let's take the output of this glass shader and plop it in to the top pin connector for the mix shader' where the first chadder goes into so the mix share the religious combines two shaders with like a factor like it blends between the two let's take the output of this bsd f and connect it into the bottom pin on our mix shader' note let's take the output of this mix shader' note and connect it to the surface output of this material and now it's a little bit hard to see but essentially this shader is now a mix between the glass and the principal psdf you can see this working if you now change this factor here and Akash's click into it and drag it left to go more towards glass or you can drag it over to the right to go more over into the solid psdf and this is really cool this allows you now to control the blending of different shaders together the amazing thing and this is where it gets really interesting is that this factor doesn't have to be stable you can feed a texture into this factor and so the pattern of where these two shaders get changed from glass to solid changes so let's feed for example a nice texture into this factor and so then we'll have a noise pattern of glass and the rest will be solid for that let's come up into the top it adds come into texture and let's pick a nice texture so nice texture let's drop this note right in here it's got an output for color or a factor let's grab the factor and connect that up into our mix shader and if you can't quite tell what this is doing you can also take the output of this factor here connected directly to the material output so you can see ya see how we have noise but it's not detailed enough it's also not contrast enough because where it's black we would see the glass material and where it's fully white we would see the principal psdf but because it's kind of it's not very solid it's it doesn't work well with this mix shader' now in order to preview the output of the current note there's also a free add-on that actually included in blend that's called the note Wrangler add-on which you can enable but I don't really want to get into that I want to keep it as simple as I can so now this noise texture we're just looking at the output of that it's just not contrasty enough so what we're going to add is we're going to add a color ramp to make it more contrasty so let's this time had shift & a to add a new note let's come to convertor let's select the color ramp note and rather than just dropping it on the side let's actually drop a directly on this connection between the factor and the output for the material that's going to plop this note and connect it right where we need it and you can out change these two sliders around to make the output of that a lot harsher maybe not too harsh I don't want a little bit of a blending happening right there but I do want it to go from fully black to fully wide so maybe a little bit more black then why to be honest I want to see the black patches should be glass and the rest will be solid and now let's take this pattern to control where we see the glass and where we see the solid principle psdf so with a mix share a note let's take the color output of this color ramp and plug it into the factor for our mixer let me just move these nodes to the side a little bit and let's take the output office mix shader' and plug it into the surface for the material and now something interesting happens wherever the pattern is white you'll see the solid color and you can keep treating this color ramp so let's just make this a little bit narrower so it's a bit more obvious and you can really see how the shader this mix shader' node now changes between glass and this principle psdf so this is actually I mean this is kind of a wacky look but it's it's really amazing that you can do that but maybe the pattern is a little bit too random for me maybe I just want to go with it you know just a normal gradient instead so let's just come up at texture let's add a gradient texture and again let's check out the output of this node and just select the factor and plug that into the surface material output and again it's a little bit too soft so again let's just plop that in to our color ramp and then the output of the color ramp into the material just to see what that looks like yeah it's kind of cool so but let's just make this a little bit softer and maybe I don't want the gradient to be linear either maybe I wanted diagonal let's see what that looks like yeah cool I think that I think that might make a much more interesting look there's a slight this over a little bit more and now I don't need the noise texture node anymore so with that noise section all selected x2 just delete it off and now this color amp again it's still going into the fact for a mixer and all that blends between the glass and the principal psdf let's take the output of that plug that into the surface and yeah that that is actually looking pretty cool let me just tighten this a little bit it's just a little bit too soft but here you can see how at the front you've got this glass and then it goes over into the solid tail and this is actually looking really cool and you can use all sorts of different inputs or even image textures or other things to control how these things are being blended together now let's do something cool let me just actually give it a little bit more class texture Sam's gonna make this a little bit wider so there's a bit more glass on the front of the dragon and let's say I wanted to adjust the edges all of the edges of this glass part to glow so for that we can mix this glass shader because again you can build a tree as big as you want to here in this node editor let's again mix that together with an emission shader so shift and a come into shader let's add an emission shader drop that here maybe I'll just make this a little bit like orangey fiery maybe a little yellowish so let's say this emission shader let's say I want to mix that together with the glass shader that's again drop down another shader this time again mix shader' going to drop that right into the connection of this glass psdf to the other mix shader' right now well it's kind of just gotten darker because we're only seeing half of it to take the emission shader plug that into the second half and yeah it doesn't look very interesting because it really just blends the two together kind of 50/50 and you can kind of go between them so you can go more towards the glass or more towards the emission shader but again we can control how well this gets applied let's say I only wanted to apply to kind of the outer or not necessarily outer edges but just have the parts of the model that are kind of facing away from me for that we can use another input node has come to add input and I'm going to add a node called layer weight let's drop this node down and this is not outputs either the fernell or the facing which is kind of the inverse of the fernell and if you don't know what that is let's just check out what is different else so let's take the output of this node connect it to the surface output of our material you can kind of see how this highlights all of the part like all of the vases of this model that are aiming away from us so the faces that are flat on where the normals are looking at us are kind of darker and but it kind of gives this really cool highlight if you look at the facing output instead let's connect that to the material put it's kind of the universe of that and we could use either one but again I think I want to put this through a color ramp because I'm finding it's not quad contrast enough and it also doesn't give me quite enough control so again shift and a come down to the convertor another color ramp let's drop that just into the layer weight output let's adjust this a little bit so we're really just getting the outline if this is kind of cool for tune shaders as well so you could use this as a you know like as a bit of a toon shader kind of feel to it again we're not building something that necessarily is useful I just want to show you all of the cool stuff that you can do with the shader editor once you go past just using the material tab and you go to the shader editor a whole world will open up for you so now let's take the output of that to control where the glass and the emission shade are being blended together let's take the output of this color ramp and connect it to the factor on this first mix shader' that mixes the glass and the emission shader together let's connect the output of that shader to our servers just to see what that looks like and you know that this really cool yellow highlight on the edges of the glass and again this actually emits light so if you place this dragon and see in those parts would emit light but again let's mix it that together with our principle psdf using this gradient texture for that let's just connect the output of the second mix shader' again to the material output and again not necessarily useful but it's looking pretty cool you can just as for sci-fi effects as well you can kind of give it this blue highlight around tech objects and you know build really cool UI elements and effects and other things with that and it just keeps on giving like there's so much cool stuff you can do let's look at something called ambient occlusion and if you've worked with 3d before you probably know what ambient occlusion is but again let's just go through this let's come to the shader it's a shift and a let's add another input and let's select ambient occlusion let's drop this in and again let's just check out what the output of that node is and what a meet occlusion does it kind of simulates the physical effect where within an object that are kind of close together or kind of in tight spaces like the nooks and crannies of little objects get darker because less light would reach those places whereas the outside you know more light would get there so it kind of represents like a bit of an natural shading that would happen with the way light bounces around the real world but again like we can change the color of this we can kind of create something slightly different again for that let's drop down yet another color ramp I'm going to drop that right into the connection between ambient occlusion and output and it doesn't have to be always black and white you can actually change this color to anything you want so let's change the bottom color here let's maybe say I want to give it a bit of greens let's make this a little bit brighter let's give this like a darkish green color at the bottom so now we're kind of adding green into the shadows let's bring the top end in a little bit and it's kind of you can make it look like there's moss growing kind of just the dark areas or there's cut the hidden areas of the model it's just like a little bit of green maybe it's a little bit too subtle let's just make this a little bit stronger and again we could use a mixture or you know protect this in any other way into our graph but what I'm actually going to do is I'm just going to take the color output of that and make that the base color input for our principal psdf which again represents the back end off the dragon because the front uses the glass shader and again let's take the output of all of that let me just disconnect the surface right here so now let's connect the final shader so we have a glass shader mixed together with an emission shader using just the facing so we're just getting this nice edge highlight that then gets mixed together with a principled psdf using our gradient texture and the principal psdf will have a little bit of a greenish nough sin the darker areas off at the model so let's take the final output of this mix shader' connected to our material note and there you go by the way if you find that the environment light is getting a little bit too dark let me just make this image a little bit bigger you can always come back into the world and you know wherever you have your environment texture assigned it's got a strength right now that's set to one lets us try to to just double the amount of light maybe even three and just get a little bit brighter because that environment light comes throughh brighter and this is actually a pretty cool looking material now this is surprisingly complex it's got glass on the front it's got the glowing emission highlight then it blends into this VSD F solid marble ish shader but it's got a bit of green in there as well and again with the shader editor you can customize as you can connect more notes into it you create bump Maps noise textures and use that and blend it all together into you know like your own ginormous node graph there is very little that you can't do with it and the cool thing with this system with this note based system is that blender going forward is starting to introduce this note based workflow into other areas like particles something that I'm hugely excited about because I do so much visual effects in animation like a lot of things in blender would be driven by this node based logic and it just unlocks so much more yes menus are nice and you know you can manage a lot of things directly in your properties panel and you know but it turns into a huge menu and it's so much easier and so much more natural I think to work with a node based graph hopefully this tutorial gave you a first look at what the shader editor is and why you want to use it but I'm hoping that it also gives you a glimpse at all of the unlimited possibilities to create some truly amazing materials in blender and that's all this to it if you enjoyed this video please hit that like button if you're new here that subscribe button and really helps out my channel also don't forget to enable the little bell if you actually want to get notified if you do have any comments questions or suggestions just leave them down in the video description and as always thank you very much for watching and until next time I will see you later [Music]

Channel: Surfaced Studio

Views: 54,322

Keywords: blender, tutorial, blender 2.80, shader editor, advanced materials, noise texture, 3D, how-to, instructions, free 3D software, Surfaced Studio, how to create custom shaders, custom materials, Cycles rendering, node-based shader, glass shader, marble shader, ambient occlusion, subsurface scattering, mix shader, intermediate, dragon model, free 3d model

Id: iVjnS5Z77Ww

Length: 23min 48sec (1428 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 19 2019