Blender 3 - Complete Beginners Guide - Part 2 - Materials & Rendering

hello and welcome to part two of the complete beginner's guide to blender 3. in this lesson we'll be looking at materials and rendering out our scene and we'll be talking a bit about the complexities of render engines do remember to check out the playlist on this channel or my website for more great content so here's where we got up to last time in order to add colors we first need to understand the viewport display options now these are all up the top right here the one we're on at the moment is called solid mode that shows our object with some shading on them but there's no impact of the light which is up here and we don't see any colors or material effects we can also view our scene in wireframe mode which is the one next to it and it shows just that the objects in wireframe this can be very useful if i go to side view now i can really clearly see my object and position it in the scene it becomes much more important when we come to editing our shapes later as well the other side of solid mode is material preview mode i'll select that and come around to the front slightly suddenly all our objects turn white which is a default material when one hasn't been assigned and we're starting to see a little bit more detail in some of the shadows i'll talk more about this mode in a moment but the last mode is rendered mode just up to the right here if i click on that we see them all with their colors which are white but being affected by a gray background so they end up looking a bit gray but we also see the results of the light which is here if i select the light and press g to grab you can see the results of that light as i move it around so take a moment if you haven't already to have a look at each of those modes and move your light around in rendered mode to see the effect now remember that our final scene will be looking through the camera just here can you remember how to go to camera view well there's two ways of doing it we can click on the camera here which will take us in and remember i can middle mouse button to come out a camera view or i can press zero on my numpad just like that remember all these options for view can be seen in the view menu under viewpoint and you've got all the options and their keyboard shortcuts just there now rendered view is what we will actually see when we finally render our scene and want to make it into a still image or a movie to do that we can come up to render and render image and you can see the keyboard shortcut is f12 so i'll click that a new window appears and we can see what the camera sees we can see the effects of the light and the materials on our objects i'll close that down and we'll talk about how to move the camera into position a bit later on but for now i just want you to understand that render view up here is how your scene will actually look through the camera the other options are there to make life easier when modeling and texturing so i put it back to solid mode now for adding color or materials it's best to go up to the shading workspace up here and you can see the different workspaces at the top and you can edit these workspaces and save workspaces as you go along and as a beginner all you'll probably need is the layout mode and the shading mode for now so i'll click on the shading so you can see how it changed our workspace we've got our viewport in the middle here with some subtle differences that we can see this funny ball down the bottom here remember my keyboard shortcuts are still here if you need to see those we've also got the file browser you can change these windows up the top here and you can see this is currently the 3d viewport if i go to this one you can see this is the file browser this one down here is the image editor and this one here is the shader editor we've also talked about the outliner already which lists our objects and you can actually group objects in here as well the last one which we haven't talked about yet is the properties and we'll come to that later we won't be using the file browser or the image editor in this beginner course so we don't need to worry about those for the moment you can actually change the size of your windows if you come into the middle of them here where your cursor changes to the arrows you can click and drag and change the size of the windows you can also right click here and we can join areas and i can actually say which one do i want to overtake the other and i can then left click i wouldn't suggest doing this as a beginner because it can be a little bit awkward this operation so i'm going to put that back to where it was by clicking and dragging in the corner and just changing that back so it doesn't confuse anybody okay so how do we add materials so like i was saying all these objects have in effect no material on them so they kind of have this default material which is white and if i click on the original cube that actually has a material because it starts with one whereas the other objects don't but we do have an option here of adding a new material so let's start with the uv sphere so for me it's got no material so i can add one here so click on new i'll just zoom a bit into our principled bsdf and our material output nodes here so you can see them easily and i do that with the middle mouse button and i can also click and hold my middle mouse button or my scroll wheel in order to move around now this looks fairly intimidating this long list of things you can change and it can be fun to play around with but the main thing we want to look at the moment is the base color if i click on the white which is currently the base color the color wheel comes up and i can choose the color i want the further i go out in the circle the more saturated color and the less saturated towards the middle and i've got my tone bar down the side here which will make it darker or lighter so if i want to change this to a blue a nice saturated blue i can push it across to there and i can make it a nice bright blue or a dark blue at the side here then if i move my mouse away that box disappears okay so if we select the cylinder now your challenge then is to add a red material to the cylinder pause the video and have a go at that okay so hopefully you remembered that i pressed new here and under the base color you click on the actual color and we'll bring it across the red and we'll have a nice bright red this time move my mouse away and that's taken effect now what we might want to do is label these materials so i'll call this red i'll click back on the uv sphere that shows that material i created the blue material and i can change this to blue so your challenge then is to add a new material with a different color to all your objects pause the video and have a go at that so we start with the cube that actually has a material already i can just rename that and i'll call it green and change my color to green a bit of a darker green just there and my cone i'll give that a new material purple and rename it i'll zoom out a touch and quickly do the others so there we have all my materials with a color i'll leave the floor white that's absolutely fine now let's look at a few other properties within the principled bsdf for this i'll click on my uv sphere here now what happens if i want two objects to share the same color well let's click on my uv sphere here all the colors in my scene are actually in this drop down just here and you can see them all listed and i can change this to the green so both these two have that green material now if i make any changes in here let's say making it very dark green like this both of them are changing that's because like i say they're sharing the material that is called green so you got to think of this like a paint bucket we're using the green paint bucket to paint these two objects they aren't individual to each of these if i wanted this one to be separate from this one then i have to create a new material so i can either close it down by using that cross here which will then turn it back to white and i can add a new material just there or i could choose one from the drop down list but that will share with one of the other ones unless it's the blue which isn't being used by another one or if i put this back to the green with this drop down just here i can create a new material here that's based on the green old material so if i press new material now it's got green 001 but it's still the same however when i make changes now let's make this a light green you can see it only changes this one and not the previous one because this is actually a new material because we created it just here so i'll call this light green so let's take a quick look at some of the other properties of our principal bsdf i'll zoom in on my uv sphere now i can strafe with shift middle click and zoom in with my wheel and try and find the middle point to be able to orbit around or i can use the frame selected command have a quick think where that is and the keyboard shortcut so we can go up to here to view and frame selected we've also got the keyboard shortcut there numpad period so if i press that we're zoomed in on our object and it's at the center of our frame i'll zoom out just a touch though now other things within the principal bsdf that are quite fun to play with are the metallic the roughness the emission which makes it give off light and for more intermediate levels the normals the other options you will use much more rarely so don't worry about them to start off with so let's go back up to the top and first look at the metallic objects are generally metallic or not so metallic or dielectric we say at the moment it's fully dielectric because there's no metallic so it looks a bit plasticky i can click on this and change it to one and you can see it turn that sort of metallicy look or i can click and drag up to one and zero you can obviously make materials that are 0.6 metallic but they wouldn't mimic real life but it's nice to have a slider there so we can decide whether we want it to be like real life or not so i'll make this fully metallic the roughness is the next one this is a very rough metal here and the opposite of roughness is shininess or glossiness it's sometimes called and you can see the reflection of the background using the material preview mode up here now the nice thing about material preview mode and why it's so useful is that it lights our scene with an image like this and that gives it a really realistic natural look it's not giving off any shadows so it doesn't quite look realistic yet but it is lighting it in a nice realistic way however if i go to rendered mode it's all gray and it's reflecting the grayness you can just see a flicker of our light source just there so you can see it's quite reflective but it's not reflecting the other objects in the scene or the floor so it just looks like a gray green i'll talk more about how we can get the reflections in there a bit later on but for now understand that the background in rendered mode is just this gray background that you can see here and you can actually see the background in the shader editor if i click on this object option here we can change it from object which are these obviously different objects here we can change it to world and if we look at our nodes they're slightly off screen at the moment and it may be that you might have them way off screen like this and not see anything but if you press the home key that will frame your nodes and we can see our gray color background here if i change this to something like purple it starts making everything look a bit purple so we don't really want any color in there at the moment i could drag this back into the middle here or i could actually use the saturation that will also take away the color and give it a little bit more light that looks a bit better however it's still a bit boring with this gray and i'll talk about how we can add an image to this later on much like our material preview mode let's go back to that for now now you might be thinking well why don't we just use material preview mode the good thing about material preview mode is that because it's not taking into account the lighting in our scene it will render as in updating the viewport nice and quickly whereas the more complicated your scene gets and if we go across the rendered mode here the tougher it is for our computers to calculate so if we get a scene with lots of detail lots of reflections that we'll put in later it may not update particularly quickly so let's go back to material preview mode for a moment i'll zoom out just a touch and what i want you to do is to have a bit of a play with the materials for example i'll click on the ico sphere here and we can't see our nodes that's because we're still in world so i need to change that back to object and now i can see my principled bsdf again have a bit of a play around with the color the metallic the roughness and the emission i use this as an example so i'll come down here the emission in terms of the emission color i'll put that to something like a blue color here at the moment it's only got a mission strength of one but if i put that up you can see it becoming very bright although it's not affecting the other objects which is a limitation of material preview mode because remember it's trying not to calculate the lighting to make our viewport nice and quick i'll talk more about that later so pause the video here and change the properties of each of your objects so now you've had a chance to play with those i'll come in and change just one more i'll choose the floor this time i'll add a new material to it and i'll change this to fully metallic and i'll give it a gray color lastly i'll come down to the roughness and make it nice and shiny now this looks a bit strange because the objects are being reflected and this gives me a chance to talk about render engines so material preview mode uses ev whereas rendered mode uses either ev or cycles you can find these options under the render properties so at the moment the render engine is eevee and i can change the engine just here don't worry about workbench it's something you probably won't use just concentrate on ev and cycles for now ev is a real time render engine whereas cycles is a ray trace render engine which calculates all the light bouncing all over the place and it takes a bit of time to calculate that eevee because it tries to be real time as in calculated almost instantly it has to fake a lot of these light bounces and realistic reflections and so forth that's why with ev if i click on that we've got lots of options here one is screen space reflections if i click on that suddenly we get some reflections they're not particularly realistic but they're not bad if i come into my sphere here you can see that the red cylinder is not reflected in the green reflective material but the screen space reflections is making it look a bit more realistic also if i turn on bloom we can see that my emission from this object it looks like it's giving off a bit of light whereas in reality it's not giving off any light we can't see any against this red cylinder here but it's faking it with that bloom so those are some nice options there the other one that's useful is ambient occlusion if i tick this and look at the base of the objects you can see there's these tiny shadows being created and that can sometimes help with those really dark shadows that are in the depths of cavities so i would suggest having ambient occlusion bloom and screen space reflections all turned on when you're using eevee now if i go across the cycles again we can't see any difference at the moment that's because we're in material preview mode which only uses ev trying to keep it nice and quick when we're moving around and instantly updating however if i go to rendered mode now now we're starting to see the effects of cycles and if i move around can you see how it's all grainy and you've got this sample option over here that takes a moment to update whenever i move it those samples are kind of calculating all these bounces and trying to come up with realistic results you can see the reflections in my sphere here of the different objects and they move when i move around and they're much more realistic you can see a bit from this emission here if i click on this object let's scroll down to the bottom where the emission is and turn the emission right up we can see the influence of that emission and i'm doing that by clicking and dragging on the emission value so cycles is far more realistic but it takes time to render hence why we use ev with material preview mode to do quick materials and then we go across the cycles later on to get them ready for rendering and if i press 0 on my numpad we can see through the camera to our objects in rendered mode which at the moment is cycles if i change that to ev we see evie as the render engine and back to cycles we see those realistic looking reflections okay so let's move our camera into position and render our scene so it looks a bit nicer this is probably easier in layout mode so i'll go back to layout mode up here the layout workspace let's go to ev so we can see what it's going to look like and to move our camera we can come out of camera mode come around to the side select our camera and press g to grab move it into position that gets a bit awkward it's better to go into camera mode with zero or press the camera icon here then press n to get this toolbar up here now you'll see something slightly different i've got my shortcut keys add-on just there what we need to look at is view and under view we've got view lock if we tick the camera to view i'll just make that a bit bigger so you can see it make sure that's ticked now when i press middle mouse button to move around my viewport it's actually moving the camera and i can use the wheel to scroll out hold down shift to move it into position and i can position my camera as if it's a viewport with the same controls so a quick challenge to you before you move your camera into position i want you to put these objects so they're clumped a bit closer together just to practice the moving and rotating and so forth remember to rotate your objects remember to keep them above the floor and maybe scale a few objects as well just to practice that one so pause the video and have a go at that so for that it's probably easier to come out of camera mode maybe go to top view with seven and select our objects and clump them together a bit more i'll rotate the monkey the torus i'll rotate and maybe scale that up a bit and the cylinder i'll move around to the front rotate it and scale it down i'll come to front view as well now and with this object the cylinder i'll just put that on the floor and the torus i'll move that upwards now my objects they are overlapping so let's go to seven again and make sure that doesn't overlap so bit of a rotation there and we're there back to camera view and this is what we see and i can now zoom in a bit so either wheel or hold down control and press the middle mouse button and maybe find a nice angle somewhere around here perhaps if you're finding it difficult to orbit remember you can click maybe the middle object press the period key on your numpad or view frame selected and the camera will frame that object and i can just zoom out a bit to find the right position so in the layout tab just here we can still look at rendered mode just up here and we can see that nice realistic results the last thing that might be nice to do is to with these rounded objects such as the sphere here i can select that and right click to get the object context menu and there's a shade smooth option there so it will smooth out the shading and looks that bit nicer same with the taurus i think right click shade smooth and i'll talk about the cylinder later on but that doesn't work with the cylinder at the moment if i right click shade smooth it's shade smooth these edges as well which doesn't really work so we'll leave that for the moment as shaded flat okay now we can render our scene so try and think how you can do that well we come up to render and the keyboard shortcut is f12 but render image just there but we can see it's taking quite a long time and that's what's called the samples just here can you see they're slowly creeping upwards so i'll close that down for the moment and talk about samples let's go back to the render properties here one way we can speed it up is by changing the device to the gpu that's if you have a powerful gpu in your machine it's usually a lot faster than the cpu i'll change mine to the gpu and instantly you can see how quickly it's going with the gpu that i'm using which is a geforce rtx 280 ti if the gpu is grayed out you need to go up to edit preferences come down to where it says system and under the queue to settings make sure your graphics card is ticked and you might want to under the optics make sure it's ticked as well that's quite a clever way of speeding up your renders again we can just close this down and it will work the other option we got here is sampling now viewport sampling is what we will see in the viewport and render sampling is what we will see when we press f12 and render so the viewport is a lower sample count but the render is much higher so if i move my camera slightly you can see it updating there with my gpu but it's only going up to a thousand samples to try and keep it nice and quick and responsive whereas the render is 4 000 so it'll take four times as long if it's really slow for you you might want to turn the max samples down maybe to something like 2000 and then press f12 and you can see because i've changed the graphics card 2000 isn't taking too long but it depends on your graphics card and your computer's capabilities so you'll want to adjust the samples in the render count to suit your machine and there we have it our rendered scene looking nice if you want to save this image you go to image and save as and then you can just name it and save it incidentally if i close this down change my render engine to eevee and press f12 to render this is the results we get and you can see the problems with the reflections not being quite realistic and this light not really giving off light properly we won't be using the scene in the next episode but do remember to save your work if you want to keep a record of it thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 140,852

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Id: g5lHlUB66r0

Length: 19min 26sec (1166 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 06 2021