How to Create Realistic Puddles in Blender

have you ever noticed that in nearly every movie shot at night the ground looks soaking wet this is no mistake rough surfaces become almost pitch black in the dark so to keep the shot from feeling unbalanced movie makers deliberately hosed down the ground before shooting this reflects more light and keeps the shot more balanced and visually pleasing to the viewer true story hi i'm andrew price and in this video you'll discover an easy way to do this in blender we'll be making realistic puddles that can be used for making a scene look like it just rained or for making your nighttime shots infinitely more appealing so open up blender and start with any material you want to make look wet in this case i'm going to be demonstrating it on a basic concrete material next add a glossy shader with the roughness set to zero to make it sharp like a mirror then add this to the concrete using a basic mix shader since the reflections look stronger at the edges also going to add a fresnel node and connect this to the factor input next up we're going to darken the material this is to mimic a real world effect known as refractive mismatch basically that when water molecules are absorbed into a surface it becomes smoother giving sharper reflections but at the same time it also reduces the number of scattered rays thus making the surface appear darker now it's not necessary to understand all this but it helps in layman's terms when rough surfaces get wet they get darker so add a mix node just before the diffuse shader and set the blend mode to multiply then change the bottom color to black this will allow us now to control the darkness of the material simply by increasing or decreasing this factor value now your material should look perfectly wet so if you wanted to stop here you're welcome to but with very few exceptions materials generally look better with more variation so let's add some puddles we'll do this by adding a noise texture this will create a simple black and white map of clouds which if we connect to this mix shader will make the black areas wet and the white areas dry but the effect is too subtle at the moment so let's add a color ramp in between it and adjust the sliders like this much better to make the puddles look even more realistic we can make this noise texture affect the reflection roughness now in the real world this happens because as a surface dries the water molecules no longer completely fill the tiny microscopic gaps and from a distance this fools your eyes into thinking the reflections are slightly blurry so plug the color ramp into the roughness of the glossy shader so the drier the material the more blurry the reflections then to make it effect which parts of the surface look dry add a mix node and drop it in between the fresnel and the mix shader take the color ramp output and put it into the factor input to act as the mask then set the bottom input to black this will ensure that the puddles are combined with this fresnel effect to show which parts look dry and that's it a simple way to create puddles that can be used to make your scene look rainy or to balance your image compositionally and make it more pleasing to the eye if you enjoyed this video please press like and to see more blended tricks like this one click subscribe thanks for watching

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 271,613

Keywords: Blender (Software), cycles, Tutorial (Media Genre), rain, puddles

Id: oojlF0m8KSE

Length: 3min 30sec (210 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 06 2015