All Blender Principled BSDF Settings Explained

the principle bsdf allows you to create physically based shaders that react in a realistic way based off of physics it's really good for realistic materials as well as stylized materials as it's based off of disney's design so we'll skip the first two settings here because they all only make sense once you know about the other settings so the base color is just the regular color without any lighting so this is what the color would be if it was completely unlit next we got our subsurface options subsurface is for materials that light can go inside and bounce around and then come out somewhere else which technically is every material except for metal but many materials might not have that that noticeable if they aren't very thin so this is good for things like leafs or for like light coming through thin parts of skin like your ears and then like certain other materials like candle wax so as i enable it you can see that it turns white and that's because the subsurface color is basically the same thing as the base color but for subsurface materials so if i want to be the same i can just click this little eyedropper and click that now if i went to my rendered view we've seen lights and stuff on you can see that there's a little bit of something going on here where there's some light going through now with ev you're going to want to go ahead and select the material and then down there's settings subsurface translucency and that's going to make it so that the light can actually go through the back so if i had like a really thin material you can see that the light goes through and you can see it coming out the back which would be good for if i had like a leaf now you don't have to enable this in cycles as it's not even shown with cycles because of this ray tracing you have to make sure that mesh actually has thickness for it to be able to go through as you can see well if i looked in eevee it just kind of acts like it's a very thin piece next we've got the subsurface radius now this acts as both like how far the light can go as and since it's split up into xyz for rgb red green and blue it says this is how far red light can go this is how far blue light can go and this is how far green light can go so as you can see it's more red and that's based off of what it would be like for skin well if we said that this was like a leaf because it's green we could add some green maybe turn on the red a little bit and have it be like a yellow green then it would be kind of more like a leaf would be and then you can turn down the subsurface amount and then of course you have to make sure that the color would be the same if you do that it acts as a mix amount and as a multiplier of the subsurface radius for subsurface materials this chris denson burley option is here which can be either that or a random walk now random block doesn't work in eevee only in cycles so if i turn down cycles you can see now random walk is a bit better for really thin materials if i did switch between them here with this one that's not really thin at all there's not really much difference but if you shrunk it down you can see there's a bit of a difference where this is much more yellow and this one's coming out as much more green so run and walk should be more realistic now it does have some problems however random walk has issues where there's areas where it's not like sealed or there's overlapping like in the susanne's eyes you can see that it's kind of ending up with this like bluish area that's kind of weird here when you're using random walk if i change it to christensen bailey it looks more like you would probably expecting this area and that's because as you can see with the eye there's a little bit of it overlapping and it's not sealed there's a hole there which random walk has issues with random walk is also slower but if you don't have the issues with the holes or overlapping parts it looks better usually next up we got our metallic option if i turn this on it looks like metal which means that it has fully specular reflections and no diffuse now normally you wouldn't have a material that's kind of in between it's usually either zero or one except for if you got like a texture where there might be a little bit of anti-aliasing going around the edges of areas that are metal or not metal but generally you either have this at 0 or 1. next we've got specular which changes how strong the specular highlights show now most people just leave that at 0.5 since most materials are pretty close to that and then you can like save a texture if you're making textures but technically speaking if you want perfectly realistic results i think that some materials have a little bit of a difference so you can find that online specular tint changes the color of the specular to match the base color so if i pull it up it becomes tinted red here now if i had like a black it doesn't do it because it's just the hue roughness is how rough or smooth the material is if it's rougher it's going to have more blurry highlights while if it's smoother it's going to have much more sharp highlights and you can see when you have an hdri in the background you can see the reflections of the trees and stuff next we have anisotropic which is cycles only if we turn this on we can see that it elongates the specular highlights this is good for materials where there's small surface bumps that are elongated in one direction such as like brushed metal with its long brush like marks or for like hair where each strand acts as a long surface bump for hair particle systems where you have like each hair actually modeled out and you like go ahead and groom it and stuff you're just going to kind of get that by default because you have all the hairs strands actually modeled out so that effect could be used more for like hair cards on a video game character or like an anime character where you'd have the hair as a big chunky model instead of each strand now the anisotropic rotation just rotates the reflection pretty straightforward sheen gives like a little highlight around the edges it kind of creates an effect similar to cloth where you have like a little bit of fuzz that's picking up light so this is good for cloth materials and then a sheen tint decides how much to tint it as the base color similar to the specular tint if you turn it completely off it's going to be white if you turn it on it's going to be more red matching the red in the base color clear coat adds like another layer of specular which is good for things like car paint or like a guitarist finish so as you can see if we have like you can have like a rough reflections on the bottom and then a much smoother one with a clear coat roughness on the top and this can be good for things like car paint now i think that car paint has like non-metallic paint with like metallic specks so we'd probably have something that would average out to somewhere in between so that looks kind of like car paint transmission gives you like a glass-like effect and the ior decides like how the light is reflected into it which is the index of reflection and you can look this up for different materials online if you tweak it it changes how the light is refracted in it and the transmission roughness decides how rough the transmission is now it doesn't seem to really have any effect on eevee so you'd have to go into cycles to see the difference now emission is like a color that i can emit as light so if i turn off this emission strength it starts glowing i can turn on bloom and that gives like a glowy effect by blurring the areas that are over 100 brightness and if i added a plane here in eevee it doesn't light it up but if i went into cycles it would light it up so if i change this to even higher it gets even brighter so the light that's emitted here actually affects other objects in cycles i forgot to mention ggx versus multi scatter gx which determine how the light is distributed on the mesh so if i switch between these two and wait for it to compile you'll see that kind of by default there's not really a difference basically multi-scholar ggx is where when the light hits the material and it's a rough material the light might hit one of the tiny little simulated bumps and then it might bounce onto another one of those tiny little simulated bumps and then eventually reach your eye so multi sky gx will look a little bit brighter than ggx on rough materials so multi scatter is a bit more realistic because ggx only does one bounce it can't go bouncing around the little bumps in the material so if i changed the roughness up and then switch between the two there's still really no difference this seems to only affect metallic or transmission materials so if i turn up the metallic slider and i had low roughness very smooth material not really going to notice a difference if i changed it up so you'll see that multi scatter is a little bit brighter which is a little bit more accurate and i guess this would be probably more white than bright red if it's a metal and the same happens with transmission if i turn on transmission multi-scatter is just a little bit brighter unless the roughness is low where they look pretty similar because light can't bounce off it just goes directly back into your eye so those are the situations where multi-scattered ggx improves the look a little bit it's a tiny little bit slower but in the cases where you have a rough metal or rough glass material then it can be worth it okay next we got alpha turned down low enough it's just going to turn black now if i go into cycles if i turn it down it becomes more transparent until it goes out so you can have say like a pattern like a brick texture might be a pattern you might have and if i plugged that into there you can see that parts will be transparent and other parts won't be so you can use this for materials like a leaf where you might have a plane with just a leaf texture with transparency or you could use this for like glass where it would be partially transparent so partial transparency plus transmission and you get something that looks like glass turn down the roughness however in eevee you got to go into your options to be able to use this correctly so go to your material options which can also be found if you press n on the side here options and there's gonna be blend mode opaque now there's different alpha options here too so alpha blend which blends it based on the alpha now it has problems with sorting different alpha parts so you'll see that's kind of getting confused between like which plane is on which side so alpha hashed will look a bit more normal here and alpha hash is just kind of like a dithering effect where it has more or less dots of this color depending on your alpha so similar to like an old video game where you would have different dealers to get a blending effect and then we have our alpha clip which says it's either fully transparent or not transparent at all which would be again good for if we had a texture that had transparent parts and non-transparent parts like this brick we could use as an example there's also the shadow mode where you can have opaque alpha clip or alpha hashed next we got normal which acts as the direction the surface is facing so as you can see if i go into like edit mode i can enable these normals so you can see these lines say what direction the surface is going in but in your material you can kind of just lie about that so if i added like a normal here node i can plug this normal vector into there and i can rotate and you can see that the entire thing ends up just being sort of shaded in one way because it's all sort of just facing one direction and you can also use things like a bump node with a height map or a normal map node with a normal map so say i got my bricks again i can plug this factor into the height of this bump and plug the normal into here it kind of simulates the surface being facing a different direction so i can give like the shadows and highlights that i would have based off that so you can get more detailed mesh now if i smooth this out a little bit it'll be a little bit more noticeable so you can see based on the light and this height map it can determine what way the surface should face this doesn't affect the actual silhouette of the model just the shading next we've got the clear coat normal which is the same as the normal except for the clear coat layer so if i have clear coat turned on i can go at a bump node and the noise node to add imperfections to my clear coat cl plug the factor into the height here plug the normal into the clear coat normal and i can play it with a scale i have transmission turned on play with the strength and you can get effects kind of similar to like the orange peel effect that some clear coats have where there's little bumps in the clear coat because it's not perfect yeah something like this maybe you have like metal for car paint and then there's tangent which affects the anisotropic so if i turn on anisotropic and go into cycles i can go to geometry and then i can do like rotate vector vector rotate and i can plug the tangent into the vector here and maybe i'll go with euler because that's a little bit easier for me and i can plug that into the tangent and then i can rotate this and and this gives you a little bit more control than an anisotropic rotation so that's the principle bsdf node which allows you to create physically based shaders if you like this video and would like to see more blender videos like this please like and subscribe and maybe leave a comment thanks for watching see you later

Channel: MrTriPie

Views: 4,862

Keywords: MrTriPie, Mr Tri Pie, Blender, Blender 2.9, Blender Materials, Blender Shaders, Blender Principled BSDF, Principled BSDF, Blender Base Color, Blender Subsurface Scattering, Blender Metallic, Blender Normal, Blender Roughness, Blender Eevee, Blender Cycles, Blender for Beginners, Blender Tutorial, Blender Shading, Blender Anisotropic, Blender Clearcoat, Blender Transmission, Blender Emission, Blender Sheen, Blender Specular, Principled BSDF Explained

Id: hxOdY8QOhZM

Length: 17min 53sec (1073 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021