Blender Crystal-Shader-Material (FREE MATERIAL) , COMPLETELY Customizable

while there is plenty of great tutorials out there on how to create crystals in blender i actually wanted to combine everything that i liked from a few of my favorites and modify those nodes and combine and mix them together to create what i think is a great crystal shader especially if you're a beginner and you don't feel like getting into the nodes i set up a group inputs so that you guys can actually go in and adjust all of these settings yourself uh they're clearly labeled and very easy to use so before we go ahead and get into how to create the crystals the shader the environment and the scene i actually just want to show you what this shader is capable of and the actual adjustments that you can make on it very easily just using the little editor on the right here what's really great about this is that if you do have knowledge on nodes you can actually go in and make fine adjustments yourself but i made it super easy for you guys to easily adjust everything on the right so if i just wanted to simply change the color i could easily do that just by changing the top color there now of course you can change the bottom color as well and basically what i added was just a nice gradient so you can go from one color to the next now let's say you really don't want any color at all that's totally fine you can completely desaturate your crystal now of course you're probably seeing some colors still and that's coming from the dispersion that i mixed in so our dispersion mixer here if i just turn that down now you have no dispersion at all and you have a completely clear crystal the only color that's coming from the crystal now is the actual environment texture here now another really useful feature that i added in here is the actual gradient positioning so as you can see in real time i can just adjust my gradient if i just want just the top of the crystal to have that slight purple hue i can do that by adjusting the z position of the gradient and of course there are other options at the bottom here i just thought this was the most important so i put it towards the top there are so many awesome little features packed in here for you guys such as changing the overall hue of the crystal so let's say you did like the gradient that you had but you just wanted to slightly change the hue to kind of mess with that easy to do scratch density scratch scale dent scale clarity the smaller dense the bigger displacement edge randomness there are so many great little details in here that you can adjust to get the perfect crystal that you want so now i'm going to show you how to create crystals from scratch in terms of just the modeling and then i'll go ahead and overview the nodes and the environment setup as with all projects we're going to go ahead and start a new project and go ahead and delete the default cube and the light now there's two main ways that i'm going to show you how to create crystals that i found worked great the first one is using an icosphere so go ahead and add in a icosphere here and before doing anything else make sure you click this drop down and just give that one subdivision so we have less geometry to work with here i'm going to zoom in and i'm actually going to tab into edit mode and i'm just going to adjust these vertices on the fly to make them look a way that i think looks cool i'm going to go to my side view here and just kind of adjust these move them around i can scale them up i'm using g and s to scale i think that looks pretty cool now of course you can go down here and make it even flatter if you want it's totally up to you how you want to make your crystal look i think this is the easiest way to just create a crystal from scratch and now our last step is we're just going to add a little bevel modifier i'm going to give that 10 segments and then we're going to create an amount of 0.01 see kind of how that looks because we don't want to have perfectly squared off edges we actually want to have those round edges to create a little bit more realism because objects in real life don't have perfect corners most things are rounded so this looks really good we can go ahead and work with that i'm going to show you one more way to create a crystal from scratch we're going to add in a sphere here so add in a sphere i'm just going to move it out of the way and i'm actually going to add a displacement modifier to that create a new displacement texture and then within my my texture panel i'm going to create a voronoi texture as you can see it's already starting to look like a crystal and now if we go back to our modifiers tab i'm actually going to go ahead and add a bevel in here again i'm going to give it a very small bevel of 0.02 this time and then 10 segments and then we actually want to go ahead and apply both of these so i'm going to go ahead and apply both modifiers and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to go into my side view here tab into edit mode i want to make sure that x-ray mode is turned on i'm going to highlight all these bottom vertices and then i'm going to use a shortcut s z 0 and what that's going to do is scale all of our coordinates to 0 all of our vertices i'm going to scale them in just a little bit and g z to bring them up on the z axis and now if we tab out of edit mode you can see we have this nice crystal formation right here of course you can use any shape to do this with the displacement modifier i think that looks really nice and of course you can go back into edit mode you can easily move things around the way that you want them scale them back down you can pretty much do anything you want now i've made a few small modifications to our crystal that we're going to be working with here but let's go ahead and set up the scene so we want to make sure that we are in cycles today we're just going to click on our gpu and then i'm going to add an environment texture in here let's go ahead and add an environment texture we're going to open up my hdri files and we're going to go ahead and use this one right here which you can find on poly haven i will link it in the description below let's go to our rendered view and just see what we're working with it looks like our environment has correctly been installed so i'm going to snap back to camera view here now something that i always love to do in almost all of my projects is go ahead and just add an empty plain axis in here i'm just going to scale that up and i'm actually going to parent my camera to the empty so that way if i want to easily change the angle of my scene all i have to do is rotate my empty and as you can see the camera stays in place and just rotates 360 around our object so that's just a nice quick way to test different angles within your scene i'm also going to go ahead and click on my camera and just lower uh lower the view i'm going to set it to 90 degrees and just lower it on the z-axis so we have a nice flat view of our object here now in our camera settings i'm going to give this 100 millimeter focal length and i'm also going to create some depth of field and go ahead and select our actual object for the f-stop i'm going to give that 0.4 for now we'll see how that looks and then i'm just going to back the camera up away from our scene here still keeping our object in the center that looks pretty good now if we go over to rendered view it looks like we have a nice blurred background which is what we're looking for and i think i want the sun to be sort of behind our object like right about there so you can see the light coming through the crystal really nicely i'm just gonna back out behind our scene here and we're just gonna go ahead and add in a plane here we're going to scale it up really really big like that and we're going to go ahead to object apply scale i'm going to tab into edit mode and i'm going to subdivide this quite a few times here now we're going to add a displacement modifier so let's go ahead and add a displacement create a new displacement texture and then we're just going to use clouds for right now that looks pretty good maybe we'll try voronoi or stucky maybe even magic doesn't really matter it's totally up to you i'm going to add a subdivision surface modifier and what we want to do is just kind of create these nice wavy hills for this nice environment and of course i'm going to up those subdivisions and i'm going to right click shade smooth now i just need to reposition everything so that our scene kind of makes sense here right now our camera is completely covered so i'm actually going to click gz to bring this down here there we go that's a lot better i'm going to scale it up and i'm just going to rotate it around until it kind of makes more sense for our scene maybe scale it up just a little bit more bring it down i like the way that's starting to look right there if we go into our render view we can see that things are starting to look really interesting so we have a nice little scene set up here and of course you can modify anything that you've liked so far the displacement modifier is totally up to you i just thought this looked kind of cool for our scene even that looks pretty nice too so you can adjust all the rotation values anything you want this is just me setting up a scene that i think looks cool quick shout out to ducky3d for making this awesome real-time materials pack i'm actually going to go in here and just grab a quick rock texture and import it into our other scene so that we can have a nice rock formation under our crystal popping back into render view here you'll see that i've applied this nice shader to our scene here and i'm just going to make a few fine adjustments and go ahead and speed that up but like i said shout out to ducky awesome little material options here you can easily adjust all of his materials as well i'm just going to create slightly darker material i think looks really nice for our scene i really really like that so i think that looks really good let's go ahead and add in some more elements to our scene now for the purposes of this tutorial before i get into the actual shader for the crystal i'm just going to give this a quick glass shader so we can kind of see visualize what it's going to look like within our composition i'm going to duplicate it a few times and then we're going to go ahead make some rocks and then we'll get right into the glass shader as you can see i've spread out a few crystals amongst the scene scaled them and rearranged them in a way that i think looks really compositionally cool now i'm just going to create a few primitives for the rocks and just kind of give those some displacement i'm going to go ahead and speed this part up as well and then i'm going to apply the same texture that we have for the floor as you can see just like that i've created this very very cool scene not doing much work just kind of moving things around duplicating them changing the scale and sizing a little trick that i like to do is if we go into the camera here and we go into viewport display turn the pass part out up so what that's going to do is kind of create this black border around everything so you can actually see and narrow in on what our frame is going to look like without seeing all that outside imagery i just like to do this because i think it's easier to set up the scene i'm going to go ahead and copy our material that i've created over to this scene to show you what it's going to look like and i'm going to go over all the nodes and what they're actually doing so i've copied over the crystal with the shader from the other project and as you can see right here it's looking really cool i'm just going to change it to purple real quick and then i'm going to go ahead and show you how to copy it over to everything else so our hue is set it should be 0.5 i think that's the default there we go that's looking really good so now if we want to copy this over to all of our other crystal objects very easily we want to click on each object while holding shift and then the last object we click on we want it to be the shader that we're trying to copy and then control l and then go ahead and just click on link materials and what that's going to do is that's going to copy over our shader to all the things that we just had selected i'm going to go ahead and delete this i'm just going to rotate our crystal here just a little bit to make it look a little bit nicer i think that looks pretty cool and now i'm going to go into the nodes and kind of show you what is actually happening behind the scenes here when you guys open the file from gumroad you're actually going to see something like this so here's our actual node group that is controlling pretty much everything if you click on that we're gonna go ahead and tab into that and it's gonna break down basically every box that you see is something different happening with the shader so i'm gonna go over each one of those boxes right now and explain what is actually happening we're not going to go ahead and do this individually because this took me hours and hours to create so i'm not going to show you from scratch how to create this but i am going to zoom in show you every node of course provide the file for free so let's go ahead and jump into what is actually happening here so zooming in on the left side first right here we have our user inputs and basically what this is is just a group input node and when you go ahead and select your material on the right hand side here where you see all these options that is what that is right there so basically we just plug those into the values that we want to change and when you go ahead and select your material you'll be able to more easily hand select each value and adjust it on the fly if we scroll over to the right here you'll see all these divide nodes what is that why are we using math here the reason we're using these divide nodes is to give you more precision adjustment over each of your values so for example if we have our dispersion value typically you would use a dispersion of 0.1 up to maybe 2 or more but in this case you're actually going to be able to more fine-tune that without having to have that quick jump so it's actually just giving you this is your normal range it's just giving you this type of range so you just have more room to work with and fine-tune everything so that's what's going on right there now moving up to our top section here this is where the actual scratches are coming in so at the end we have everything being mixed together but each thing is separated into its own uh box so that you guys can kind of understand what's actually happening and go in here and adjust everything for yourself uh but basically i looked at a couple different scratchy surfaces for crystal tutorials and i found a lot of different things being used and i just decided to combine the best of all those worlds and create this right here so there's a few references that i included right here that i will also include in the description below but basically this is where all the scratches are happening right here you can easily adjust any of this yourself this is just what i chose to go with now if we scroll down here to our gradient color this i created from scratch just based on my own node knowledge basically all it is is color ramp gradient texture and we're kind of just mixing that into a hue and saturation value so you can easily change these colors for yourself now if we go ahead and zoom in on the crystal up here you'll see that if you adjust these values you can adjust the way that the gradient fades so you guys feel free to go in here and adjust this to your liking yes you can add more colors i just chose to go with these two because i thought they looked really nice next we have our displacement and our dents so if you scroll down here here's our reference for the dents and the displacement i went ahead and took a few notes from another project tweaked them just a little bit to my liking and i also mix those in with our final shader so again you can go in here you can adjust all your bump nodes your noise textures your coordinates feel free to adjust anything you want the shader is free so you guys can literally do anything you want with it and let's go ahead and move on to the dispersion so over here we have our dispersion this is from an awesome glass dispersion shader that i found online i'm going to go ahead and link the youtube tutorial for that basically that's just its whole own node group it's super complex but if you guys want to follow that tutorial that's fine i'm going to go ahead and credit the original creator of that as well and i wanted to include that so that you guys can get more color out of your crystal shader so now towards the end here we just have everything being mixed together so we have a couple of mixed shaders going into each other and then out into our group output that will actually go onto our material right there so yes it seems really complex but i tried to break it down and simplify it so you guys could easily understand it if you wanted to have more fine-tuned control over the shader you can go ahead and create your own user input and you can basically click and drag this line into any part of any node that you want you can label it as you want and then you can adjust it as you want so all i did was i selected the key features that i thought were the most important when it comes to creating a crystal i hope you guys really like this i worked really hard on this again sorry that i'm not going into the nodes uh more detailed but i hope that i zoomed in enough i'll go ahead and pan through them one more time i'm going to try to create a high-res screenshot of the nodes so if you really do want to get practice and set them up yourself that's totally fine like i said i pretty much went through a bunch of tutorials found what i thought was working really well and i combined them into my shader so i just think this is gonna be an awesome shader i think the community is gonna love it um there's a lot going on here but you know you get a great result in the end so guys let me know what you think down in the comments below um i hope you enjoyed this tutorial please subscribe please share this with your friends i really enjoyed making this it took me hours and hours to put this all together but i hope you love it and i hope to see you in the next tutorial take care

Channel: KennyPhases

Views: 28,561

Keywords: blender, tutorial, easy, how, to, how to, blender3d, render, animation, animations, blender tutorial, blender how to, 3dart, blendercommunity, digital art, design, blender cycles, cycles, evee, crystal, crystal shader, blender crystal, blender crystal shader, crystal material, 3d crystal, crystals, blender crystal material, easy crystal, crystal tutorial, fast

Id: PKSqgc8EFSs

Length: 15min 43sec (943 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 05 2022