Better Edge Masks in Blender - Procedural Texturing

today we level up procedural texturing in blender with better edge maps in four steps first we'll look at the traditional alternatives to our method and potential drawbacks second i'll introduce the bevel node approach to edge maps third i'll break down the dot product vector math operation in blender it sounds scary but it's not bad i'll explain why we've chosen to use this technique finally we'll wrangle in the values and build a useful node group that's reusable on any project our goal is simple we want to expose the edge value of our geometry we want this map to be procedural and to offer a full range of coverage for ultimate flexibility if your first thought is to use a pointiness value you're not alone the pointiness value can be found within the geometry texture node when fed through a map range node it can be a crude method of identifying creases and valleys within your mesh even after remapping or clamping the range however the results can often be full of artifacts and may not offer the range of flexibility that we're after the next method is to use the ambient occlusion node this is a powerful node used to identify the shadowy areas of a mesh where two surfaces come close together when used with the inside box checked it traces the rays towards the inside of the object making it a candidate for identifying edges however the results are often hard to control and don't always offer the clean edge mask we're looking for those are a few of the traditional approaches to edge masking in blender now i'd like to show you how to get a clean consistent edge mask on even the trickiest models this is what i'm calling the bevel node approach first we'll need the bevel node at its core the bevel node is an unaltered copy of an object's normal information this is essentially a vector number or a number containing three values that info when applied visually to an object looks something like this however when the bevel radius is turned up it detects the edges of the object and smooths out the normal information the result is a smooth seemingly beveled edge when rendering because the bevel node detects an object's edges and allows a growing radius around them we want to expose this information and use it for our own edge detection map to do this we need to find a way to single out this value this is where we get to step three the dot product node what is it and why are we using it remember when i said the bevel node is basically an object's normal information with the added functionality of locating and altering edge data what if we took the actual object normal data and compared it against the bevel node data essentially the identical sets of normal vectors will for the sake of this visualization cancel each other out leaving us with the only thing that stands the edge information and radius control from the bevel node so how do we do that we need the incredibly useful vector math operation called the dot product what is the dot product the dot product or scalar product is an algebraic operation that takes two sequences of numbers in our case two vector numbers indicating the normal data from the object it then returns a single number input two sets of vector numbers and get one value this single value is our almost perfect edge mask [Music] in order to bring us home we need to remap the value range we could do this with the appropriately named map range node plug the value into value and clamp the range down until you get the perfect edge mask at this point you may also want to invert the result you could do this with the map range node or you can just add an invert node notice you may need to tweak the radius of the bevel node as well depending on the scale of your object and there you go it's not much but it's a great starting point for texturing a variety of objects with four simple nodes you have a repeatable approach to perfect edge maps in blender layer with any kind of noise or grunge for limitless texturing applications you may be thinking why is this so complicated why can't it just be a single node well now it is you can group what you've made here and reuse it in future projects with the added benefit of actually knowing how things work under the hood if you didn't follow along feel free to pick up my version of the edge mask node in the description of this video i know every youtube video on the planet ends like this but please consider subscribing you'll learn more about the logic behind useful blender workflows and it really helps me out so thanks and i'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Riley Brown

Views: 177,285

Keywords: Texturing, Blender, b3d, procedural, edge mask

Id: Aa8gf1pwb4E

Length: 5min 31sec (331 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 14 2022