Dead Easy Tiles - Blender Tutorial

today and welcome to a dead easy tile tutorial where we're going to be making some today too easy tiles basically a simple method to just make some tiles that look great because tiles they're everywhere you know if you need them so first of all the reason why because I want to address why the standard method for creating tiles doesn't really work so most people and this is the way I used to do as well so I'm not calling anyone names here but most people they go back creating taller like this they go they get a texture online like from CG textures and then they feed it through a program like nailed or crazy bump to create the normal map reflection map rough it's glossy all that kind of stuff right and then when you go to render it it often doesn't look great right and then the little sad fish to let you know it's bad now the reason for that is that tiles I mean like like for concrete and bricks it's not that big of a deal because there there are a wall there dry and you can't really notice any flaws in the detail but tiles are reflective and we see them every day and it's very easy to spot their flaws so the basically now than crazy bombs they can't properly read a photo to guess where the gaps are right where the crevices are in the mortar grout how many names are there for the gap between the tile it can't guess that correctly like it can make some guesses but it's not ever accurate there's also a bunch of other things that all has like different amounts of tilts in the tile like and that will create different reflections there's different amounts of roughness on the top of the tile so you get like smudges and things like that and that's just detail that you'll never get you know using this workflow and I've always wanted a better method and so I saw like I for a while I thought that this solution was like what 3ds Max and Maya has which is these paid plugins like mighty tiles or railclone which will allow you to sort of generate the actual geometry of the floor across it but it turns out that you actually don't need that the the method this method actually works fine if you've got maps which are correct and accurate so now that we're running polygon I thought why not set that as a as a project so we hired an artist full-time for one month to create a pack of tile materials from scratch which is incredibly time consuming but the result is basically maps that are 100% accurate to the way tiles are supposed to look so the normal map the glossy mount all that stuff was basically created from scratch so that it's not guessing it's actually you know the way it should be yeah and the you know when you feed them into the correct port in blender which is what I'm going to show you in this tutorial as well as use a new feature adaptive subsurf combined with micro displacement you can create some really really gorgeous looking task tiles that are actually tilted at the right angle so you get like different amounts of you know reflection offered different amounts of gloss so that you get that you know a nice pattern like manufacturers are making really interesting tiles nowadays and you just can't capture it with with photos so yeah basically it's really cool and I want to show you how to do it in this video so follow along there's a starter file if you wanted to you know make the exact scenes that we're making that's in the YouTube description below and as well as that there is a free tile material which I want you to go ahead and download as well so I'll show you how to do that actually on polygon so this is polygon right here I suppose I should go to the home page you can see where it is but basically when you're on polygon you can see down here tiles click on tiles and it'll load up all the tiles here so there's I think they're like 30 new tiles that are created from scratch so it's basically all these ones here at the top so you can use any type by the way we're just going to use this one here the one that says free but you are welcome to zhenya because the exact same method will be true across all of them you can download any size you want I actually just use 1k because it's so away from the camera that doesn't even really matter if the camera was in really close you want to go high res but 1k is fine for this so download that zip file and then go ahead and open up the starter file in blender so quick overview of the scene and yes I've changed my shirt look at that it's amazing what you do when you don't think it's continuity and you record on one day and then record on the sixth day our scene is a box and and we have sunlight streaming in through a window and this wall here is where we're going to do the tile so we've gotta have a feature wall with some nice intricate tile material on it so make sure you've got that wall selected and you'll see the by default it's got a very exciting white diffuse material so delete the diffuse shader and I want you to replace it with not a shader but the PBR dielectric node group now if you download this starter file you would see it that's already included if you're using your own file and you want this specific node set up because I do recommend it click the link in the description or the little eye at the top corner and that'll take you to where you can download this but basically it's a PVR node setup from the tutorial that has all the correct reflection with Fornell and all that fun math stuff but it makes it really easy for creating materials like this so add that in and look at that looks like red plastic so the first thing we're going to do is add in that color texture to give it the the car okay so add in a texture image texture drop that in here select open and then find wherever it is that you unzipped that zip file and then look for the texture that has Co L at the end obviously standing for color click open and then drag this into the color input of the PBR node and now you can see it looks like it's under a very thin layer of water I just got really depressed I watched the video yesterday of the cell wall ferry disaster and it was like why it was footage captured from the thing ah I don't know why I just had that flash you know you have those moments and I just had it anyway so there you go we've got the color textile loaded into the PBR no group nice and it yeah it doesn't look good because it doesn't know where the bombs are because all it is is it's just reading the color information and it's treating it like it's completely smooth so we'll fix that when we get to the no group but first I want to focus on the roughness and the reflection because that's a really interesting part of this material is that the tiles actually some of them are matte and then some of them are really shiny so getting that difference across the tiles is going to be really important for this material so to add that I'm going to use I'm going to add in another image texture click open go back to the folder and the one that we're looking for is called gloss okay you can see what it looks like that it's basically like a little checkerboard pattern and then drop this into the roughness input there and make sure that you set it to non color data or else it won't look right it also doesn't look right now and you'll notice people think like huh I liked it before when it was actually shiny so the reason this is happening is that basically if you don't know in the industry there are two different terms for this type of map they're a gloss and there are office they're both identical however one is the invert of the other so some quick call that rough-in as some call it gloss in our case blender is looking for roughness and this is a gloss map so when you have that happen all you need to do very simple is just invert it like that and when you do it you can see that it now looks correct so you can see some of them now look like they have no reflection but really it's just it is reflecting but it's got the roughness turned up to the top and then some of them look shiny so it's turned down so yeah really cool effect now we're going to increase it even more by adding in a reflection map so I'm going to duplicate this map here click on open and of course the one we're going to use is the one ending in our our ESL short for reflection okay and I'm going to drag and drop that into the third input from the top I should just call the reflection input and and there you go now this is the before yeah and then this is the after okay so it's a very very slight thing but it just is going to give some of the tile a little bit more reflection than others and it's just yeah it just helps give it an extra push something that a lot of tile materials don't have but it'll just help it look really nice now for the bump the all-important bump there are two ways of doing the bump I'll show you the first one so and this is the way that 99% of your tile materials will use so you know makes sense to follow this I'm just going to duplicate this image texture here click open and of course we're going to use the normal map so a normal map is good because it doesn't add anything to the render times and for most surfaces it looks great now if you were to just connect this into the normal input wouldn't look right because it's using this purple information but it doesn't know how to interpret it so first feed it through a normal map node and now you can see that it looks right so you can see if you zoom right in there you'll see a very small amount of what looks like like the tiles are now raised off the surface now that is it's not actually happening which is why it doesn't add anything to the render time this is a cheat to make it look as though it's raised off the edge there so for most surfaces this looks fine because the camera is really far away and most surfaces don't require any extra detail other than that but in our case and for something where you want to have the tiles as the feature element or for certain materials you might want more than what this standard bump can provide and you can see if you cranked up this strength here it's not really going to help okay I mean it looks up slightly a little bit more raised off but everything else starts to fall apart so it's not a good idea so really the only way to do this is to actually physically displace the wall so part of the mesh should physically raise off it which will increase the render times but it will make the tiles look really really good so I'm going to show you how to do that let me get a quick drink here there's something like the sixth time I've recorded this tutorial I did a really great take just before and and I noticed my microphone was turned all the way up I don't know how others like if there's other tutorial makers out there if they encounter the same problem as I do every time I make a video anyways you guys don't care about that so talking about displacements right so for micro displacements you need to use a map to have something to displace because you can't use normal map so just so happens in our case in our zip file we have a displacement map in fact we actually have two displacement maps so one of them is a tiff file and one of them is a JPEG you can use either I would recommend using the TIFF because it is 16-bit if you use an 8-bit JPEG which is what this is sometimes you'll see stepping in the displacement because the displacement is like there's so much detail and it's just physically displacing it that it can find little artifacts in the in the JPEG or the grayscale data so having that extra 16 bits I can really it'll smooth it out so definitely if you've got it available use the 16-bit TIFF file which is why we have them on polygon a little plug there so once you've done that make sure that you do set it to non colored are very important whenever using something that isn't a colored part everything else should be non color and then you want to feed that into the displacement input of the material output now if you've never used that before that's fine because up until now there hasn't really been a purpose for the micro displacement in blender if you do want to learn more about micro displacement I've got a whole video on it you can watch it by clicking the little I at the top there but I'll just give you a quick overview now basically up until now there hasn't been a need for this displacement thing because all that we do is just use like fake grayscale bumping basically what the normal map is doing but in there so but because we're going to use micro displacement we can actually use this value right now when you connected it though you'll notice that nothing actually changed with that bump there and that's because it's still using the normal route it doesn't know to use this yet if you disconnect that you'll know that it's now using this full displacement but when you zoom in it looked absolutely care and that's because it's still cheating it's not actually physically displacing anything yet so what I'm going to do is get into the micro displacement so first of all I am using version 2.7 8c I've never seen is see before as a candidate wonderful as I get to D maybe 2.8 I'm using two point seven eight which means that this feature is actually an experimental feature so you have to go into experimental mode in order to see this but when you do that what you'll find is it won't actually change anything here but if you go to the material settings down here you'll find it says displacement and there's a little drop-down and these options won't have been there before so by default it's still using the standard the old method of bump method right but if you set it to true it's now actually going to physically displace the geometry of your mesh but it looks completely smooth because the only geometry that we've got is four vertices okay so it can't displace anything so even though this is happening in the rendering process when it does this displacement you still need to actually have geometry that it can displace so what we're going to do is we're going to add in a subsurface modifier and you'll notice when you add subsurface this little checkbox here and that is again another feature that you'll only see in the experimental mode I'm hoping to point seven nine eight whatever this will be all default or whatever but for now it's experimental so this this adaptive feature what it will do is it will displace it depending on how close you are or how far you are from the object so basically up here close to the camera that'll be subdivided more than what is over there in the distance this value here for the view actually means nothing because that's only the viewport and it doesn't make any difference to the final render so but you can see that when we do subdivide you check it's two lines when you do subdivide it's it's got a rounded edge there which is not good so we need to what's it called add a crease okay so select all your vertices hit shift E and then drag out to the maximum which will say one in the bottom left corner and then now it's a sharp edge okay good now that we've done that if we go into rendered preview mode you should see now when you zoom in you've actually got some physical changes to the geometry doesn't look right what it is physically changing the geometry now the reason this doesn't look right is only because we're in preview mode right now so this dicing rate very quickly the lower the value the higher resolution the final model will become so we're at in preview mode we're dicing it at three times three pixels but at the final render it'll base it at one pixel so which means if we give it a render right now let's see how this looks I'm sure you probably watch this down you're going really Andrew dead easy tile material tutorial this is dead easy getting into micro displacement to dicing rates I know I have to take the time to explain all these little concepts so this tutorial is you know longer than if I was to just gun it could do it in like two minutes but I want to explain what's actually going on there you go you can see in the render here that this actually looks correct now and look at how raised the surface of that tile is it looks really nice you're actually catching the light on each of those edges there and it looks really cool so you can see how how big of a difference that makes than what it looked before now one thing to note by the way if you see that it's black that is because you've got a normal map added to it if you see this yeah normal map so you have to disconnect your normal map in the previous micro displacement to tour I think I recommended using the object space for the normal map which will make it at least display but it's not correct shading so I don't know if it's a bug or a fit it's just the way micro displacement has to work maybe you can't ever use one at the same time as another but you can't use normal map squared micro displacement at this time so disconnect that but you don't actually need the normal map because really what you can do down here and that's what we're going to do now is this true displacement that's good for giving it a sort of a medium to high resolution detail like surface detail on it but to give it that next level like this is what the standard bump would do is it would like right on the edges it would give like a really small amount of bump right so what we can do is we can actually use both both the true with the grayscale bump and what that'll do yeah is it'll give us the best of both worlds so let's see I don't know why that's suddenly frozen up I get really worried when this computer starts whirring up and I don't know what's actually happening why does it seem like it's taken so long anyway see how it goes Wow four gigs of memory anyway let's let's do a proper render but before we do actually you're probably wondering by now like okay the bump is okay but it's way too much like this displacement it's just way too much how can we dial it back a bit because there's no slider underneath that displacement there the way you do that is by adding in a math note right here converter math drop that in and then set this to multiply and then this is a good one to remember but multiplied basically if you want to create a strength value like if you've got a value going into another value you want to dial it back a bit setting adding a math node set to multiply this basically becomes a percentage slider so you know 0.2% is 20% of what it was before so it's a really good one to remember well it works for so many situations I use this multiply thing a lot I happen to know that about point three point two works really well for this type of tile so that's what I'm going to leave it as you might not notice a difference in the viewport over here and that's only because you have to re-render it when you change this value here so we'll do that right now so I'm going to give this a render and let's see how it goes and there you go so we are finished you can see this is our completed node it's very simple we actually don't need the normal map either but basically we're just with four maps the color map the roughness reflection and the displacement map we've created a really nice gorgeous looking tile that's suitable for like a feature wall something that's going to you know make an impact like was it like give the render something special okay so this is what the final render looked like when you do a final render or whatever and there you go top dog in that is the tutorial hope you found it useful you can use this to make any different type of tile material the same method can be replaced for that flooring along the bottom there and really a whole bunch of materials use this same method so I'm hoping that hope you found it useful if you did please give it a thumbs up and if you're wondering if this was a promo for polygons yes it was very astute of you that is my website and obviously we're trying to get the word out there but I'm hoping you also found some value in this lesson as well regardless of whether or not you sign up but that's it thank you for watching and I will see you next time bye

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 175,987

Keywords: blender, tutorial, cycles, tile, material, poliigon

Id: H-quCLfoHbk

Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 15 2017