How To make PBR Textures | Photoshop & Blender Beginner Tutorial

hello Belinda peeps this is James from blenderbones in this tutorial we'll be creating a fully tiling and highly convincing PBR material from scratch and we'll be using nothing more than Adobe Photoshop or similar application and blender so let's get on with it [Music] now if you don't know PBR stands for physical based rendering that is a material for your 3D models that is capable of adding realism through color and its interaction to light and its reflective qualities this is all done using a series of texture image files although we'll be using blender to compile our texture files into our material there are plenty of other 3D applications that you can use them in during this tutorial we'll be using Adobe Photoshop to create the following tiling texture files let's begin by downloading a picture to serve as the foundation for our material you can visit pixabay pixels or any other website that provides totally free image downloads for this in this occasion I've gone with pixel to create a good texture file for our material the image must be large enough in its pixel measurements nowadays the majority of texture files typically vary from 1K to 4K that is from 1024 by 1024 to 1496 by 4096 pixels however for the majority of my texture files I usually choose 2K which is 2048 by 2048 pixels make sure your image is big enough also I like to look for images that will tile well the ability to spot such images will come with experience so don't stress at this point try it out see what results you get so I've downloaded this file I've saved it in a new folder I've called it bricks for because I've happened to have created three other lots of bricks before this so this is my fourth bricks material of the day I've called this one bricks hyphen 4 underscore diffuse now diffuse is the color so that's going to be used for showing the if you like the photographic aspect of this material in blender and from this I'm going to create a load of other materials there's going to be one for a normal bump possibly even height smoothness and they're all going to come together in blender to produce that one material now it's very important when you're selecting your texture file make sure that there's not too much in the way of highlight and low light in other words you don't want something which perhaps has a little too much sunlight shining on it let me see if I can find a decent example here we go there is a classic example where we have shadows everywhere highlights you're going to have to work those out in Photoshop you know so try and keep it as flat as possible something with not a lot of light and dark in it that's why I think certainly fulfills that expectation as one brick missing there which has just been cemented over so I'm going to use the Clone stamp tool I think I might take this brick here and using the alt I'm just going to paint that one out the reason why I'm doing this is because I'm going to chop these ones out anyway because I want my image to be perfectly Square so using the crop tool I just press Escape hold down the shift key and drag I should then get a perfectly Square crop like that and I'm going to nudge this up a little actually I don't really want to crop this at the moment can you see that I can't quite get it Square enough I want the start point or the edges to be the uniform I want perhaps if it's going to end in the water it's going to start in the mortar so for now I think what I'll do is let's see now if I were to Patrol a control T that's select all and then transform holding down the shift key I'm just going to compress this a little like that and then I'll go back to the crop press Escape start again hold down the shift that's it it's now in the mortar it's not quite at the bottom but that's fine I want it to be very slightly outside of the mortar because when I do come to tie all this I'm going to be dragging this mortar up to the corner this mortar down to this corner and I want it to start from the mortar and end from the mortar maybe the best way of actually explaining that is to show you now in the later versions of Photoshop under view you'll find this amazing visual tool pattern preview if I click on that and zoom out you get to see how this texture would look if it were tiling so this is going to Aid the entire tiling process and as you can see these don't quite line up there's like a half brick in between here so if I control a to select all Ctrl T to go into free transform and I hold down the control key and drag this corner point up I can straighten this out a little maybe this corner up a little so now we can see if I do the same down here and down here we've now got a consistent line going through there which is the mortar there's a bit of an edge but that's okay same up here that's actually looking reasonably convincing so I'm going to leave that as it is not all of these line up that is not a problem now I've also noticed another problem and this is something I should have spotted I missed the way the bricks are actually laying out at the moment they're not teeing properly that is normally when you see bricks they kind of have that effect you don't just get bricks laid on top of each other but you have them more to join to the mortar can you see that there so what I'm going to have to do hold shift down and drag that down to lose a row of bricks which is a bit of a shame that will have to do so using the free transform control T holding down the control key whilst clicking on these Corners you get to align your textures up and you get a good visual idea of how that is looking in a tiling system it might take a little bit of work just to get them as you want them eventually you'll get it now for areas where although this Corners are fine there's still the loss of alignment I can go to the option bar at the top here click on this icon here and choose the horizontal bar and what I'll do is I'll say right this bit's okay but this bit isn't so I'm going to put a bar there effectively locking it in place and then put another one down here click on this little box here and use my cursor Keys just to adjust and you can see what that does it kind of distorts the actual image using something very similar to a mesh that you'd perhaps see in blender again I'll add one here this one looks fine but this one I don't know maybe that's okay I'll just nudge it a little bit and I'll go around just looking to see if everything lines up properly I think maybe this is a few more Taps there yeah that will do confirm right now stamp tool guy to blend in these edges as you see the Blue Line around here is showing you where the image starts and ends and you can see the tessellation or the tiling beyond that so if I was to take my stamp tool just click here for instance alt click and then take my cursor over D here I can blend that join so now that's a seamless join I might need to go over a couple of times just to remove any repetition that's good I'll take from down here again and just tap up there the brick I'll take from over here I'll take this bit from here it's all about matching looking for areas that you can replace one part with another Pat looks good same here and over here really I could have done this more methodically by starting at the top and working my way down I sort of started in the middle but that's okay and it'll work the way down just making sure that everything's Blended correctly now once you've gone down to the bottom if you went over to the other side you'll find because it's tiling texture it's automatically done the other side so really you only need to do two edges vertical and the horizontal now the horizontal is going to be a little more involved because it's rather difficult to clone from that area so perhaps what I'll do is I'll clone from the row above I'm going to hold down the shift key and just click click click just a blended him like that so let's see now there's a bit of repetition and might just Nick from another brick paint a little bit out just to make it look a little more random so when this mortar is very ugly and messy so if I just tidy it up a little bit more there we have it tiling texture seamless tiling texture it's worth zooming out occasionally just having a look to see whether there is patination this is what I was saying earlier about tiling you want to make sure that you break that down enough so that you don't end up with wallpaper you want it to be convincing and there's one little bit here which I think is just destroying the illusion that this is a photographic texture and not wallpaper so it's just this little corner here I think what I'll do is I'll Nick from here to give to here that's not so bad now still a bit of patination but it's not as pronounced I could spend another 10 minutes on this to break that down even further but I think that will do let's just make sure we save our file now I save my diffuse as a JPEG maximum quality all of the other texture files I will be saving as PNG PNG is better at preserving detail JPEG files tend to reduce the quality in order to reduce the file size and you may get artifacts in there which will look a little odd when using on things like smoothness and bump so do avoid using any other file format than PNG some people would go as far as Tiff and all sorts of other file formats I'm going to keep it simple I'm just going to go for jpeg for the diffuse and PNG for all of the other texture files so for the diffuse over here jpeg good maximum quality okay how about we give this diffuse texture a go in blender let's apply it to a real 3D object so going to blender shift a I've added in little Suzanne it's a model you get with blender I think I'll right click shade smooth maybe add in a modifier subdivide put the subdivisions on the two for now so we've got a nice smooth model I'll also go over to the material preview so I can see how my material looks as I put it together now I've got a split screen here if you haven't got that you just click and drag see my cursors go into a Crosshair if I click and drag now split screen and choose Shader from this drop down press n to get rid of that panel we don't need it and then click on new to add a texture just to prove that this texture is added to our selected Suzanne I just put a color in there you can see it changes her I'm going to create an image node so if I just drag there image color and I'm going to add in my diffuse texture there it is open looks a bit messy okay how about from here if you have node Wrangler control T will add the mapping and texture coordinate nodes in if you don't have them well you're gonna have to manually add those two in I'll move those there and I'll drag this up here because we're going to have quite a few images adding up I think also I'm going to change the scale of this texture about three yeah that'll just about do it as we can see now Suzanne is looking a little strange maybe just a compliment Suzanne I'm going to add a cube in scan it up S grab a g Z axes drag it down maybe even scale a little bit hard in it like that if you ever change the scaling of an object outside of edit mode don't forget Patrol a rotate and scale just reset those I'll do the scene with Suzanne just in case I don't think I changed her skill and I will make sure that this also has the same texture lots of ways we could do that there we go maybe I should rename this material as brick so that will give us a good idea of how it looks right so we can see now our diffuse is working um yes if I reduce the scale a little to say something like 10 it'll give you a good idea of how it's tiling as well I might even leave her on 10 but there's not much in the way of detail in the sense of it's not really reacting with the light in any particular way so next we're going to be adding in our of map our normal maybe even a height map as well so let's get back to photoshop so let's move on to our other files just for safety because I don't want to overwrite this file I'll do a control a copy Ctrl C new control n and paste Ctrl V now before we do anything I've just noticed I've made a big blunder here one thing I've forgot to show you was the image size itself we've got our image in we've done all the magic to it but this image is way bigger than 2K the moment it's coming through at 30 24 by 30 24. that's not what we're after so if I go back to my diffuse here Control Alt I to bring up image size and I'm going to set that at 2048 make sure your height and your width for the same and I'll click on OK and I'll do the same with this one as well good save that and going into my new image this is going to be the basis for our height map now this is where it gets a little more involved there's going to be a thousand ways to do this I'm only going to show you one method a method that I like to use it's not the quickest method it's not the latest method but it's a method that will ensure that you get the quality that you're after so bear with me first things first I'm going to knock all the color out of this because we're done with color now we've done the diffuse so control U to bring up Hue and saturation and push the saturation right over here to minus 100. as you can see this is now a black and white image a grayscale image and what I'll do next is I'm going to select the bricks and divide them from the mortar and by doing so we'll be able to then generate differences in smoothness like for instance the mortar might be very dull and the prick is slightly glossy depth so we have the height normal bump all of these types of texture May deal with certain levels of depth so the mortar for instance is slightly deeper than the brick The Brick maybe slightly protrudes away from the mortar so we're going to be covering that using this one simple step so we're going to select each Brick we're going to put them onto a different layer I've got my layer palette over here if you can't see it go to window and choose layers so I've got my layers palette here and I will select the bricks put them onto a different layer and then we could do all sorts of crazy stuff with them I'm going to use Quick mask I think most people have forgotten that quick mask exists I still use it on a regular basis I just happen to like it if you can think of another method that you prefer then by all means go for it but I'm going to use Quick mask in this particular instance now what quick mask will actually do if I just click on quick Master quick key for it by the way is q Hue on its own not control q that will quit Photoshop Q on its own will toggle into Quick mask see if it says quick mask up there coming out of it comes it push back to RGB will allow you to paint if I'm using black as my color if I paint and then come out of quick mask whatever I paint I don't know if you can see that's rather difficult to see on this screen isn't it maybe I should just try with a blank document because that was rather difficult to see with that particular texture so going in a quick mask if I paint Black come out a quick mask you can see that that painted area has become a selection also weight works the other way around so if I was to get the selection tool make a selection going into Quick mask mode you get the idea in fact from Quick mask mode I could also paint White to actually remove parts of my selection it's a very good way of controlling the softness and hardness of your selection I love it it's a method I've been using for years and I'm just perhaps stuck in my ways I've been using Photoshop since the 1990s since version one shows how old I am and before we go into Quick mask mode I really should point this out to you if you come over to the quick mask icon and double click on it you get the options I tend to use selected areas this means that the selected area will appear red game change the color if you want to um but I tend to keep it on red at 50 by default it's usually on masked areas so I strongly recommend and just for the sake of this tutorial go for selected areas otherwise you're gonna have to work inverse for this now your Red's going to be the non-selected areas your selected areas are going to be the non-red so yeah I recommend just using selected areas it'll make more sense right now back to our image I'm going to deselect Ctrl D go back into Quick mask and using my paintbrush with black just reset if you need to Black has my color right click and the hardness as 100 I am going to paint each brick but before I do that maybe I should call the pop pattern preview so view pattern preview just so I can make sure the tiling is as it should be so if I just paid around the edges of each brick if I use the shift key I can actually create I can actually paint in lines like this it doesn't have to be very precise just make sure you close all of these because we'll fill these centers afterwards rathers trying to paint them in now that's going to take forever so if I paint around the edges like this and you can see already it's starting to selection itself is Standard Tile which is brilliant and I think everything's selected there that's good I'll use the magic wand to select inside of these bricks I can't actually select outside of this pounding box here so just make sure you select inside it like this you see there ends selection ends there now that I've got everything selected I'm going to expand that selection a little bit and fill it so that we've got completely filled bricks and I could do that by going to select modify and expand in this particular case I've got to guess a little bit but five should do it and you can see now the margin ants have expanded a little bit into the painted area which is Grand now if I flip my colors or just press X on my keyboard to get black as my background color hold down control and hit backspace it will fill with my background color which happens to be black which in quick mask mode is fill or red stuff deselect coming out of quick mask cue I can now drop all of these bricks onto a new layer quickest way of doing that Ctrl J and just to prove that is separate from its background or from the mortar just hide it you could see now we've separated the bricks from the mortar so now we have those separate from each other let's start monking around I think perhaps I'm going to start by creating a height map and the height map is going to show information within our texture file which is going to simulate height so maybe the way light reacts with the bricks light will shine on the top of the brick where the light's hitting it and underneath there'll be a shadow a height map will achieve that effect and it can be in the form of a bump map a normal map or even a displacement map so I always start off with a height map and then I'll create a various other maps from that let me show you if I just select my background where I've got my main layer hidden there that's the layer with the full image on and then I control a to select all and control backspace to fill with black what you actually get if you were to bring this into blender as a bump map for instance or even a placement map maybe you'll have time to look at that later is that the areas that are black at the moment or the darker areas will be the areas that are recessed the areas which are white or the lighter areas will be protruding or extrude from the surface of our 3D model so think black goes in white comes out so this is going to be our height map but I suggest we keep it as simple as possible and not have too much detail on these bricks here the background is completely flat there's nothing going on there but the white end I think what I'll do is I'm just going to duplicate this layer Ctrl J hide the original and then call up my levels this is the old-fashioned levels Ctrl L and I'll bring the Black Point not this one here but this one down here the output levels black point if I just push that up like that so there's a modest amount of detail coming through if I were to run this as a height map right now it's going to be very Stark you're going to have this sudden ledge and information so what I tend to do is I'm going to filter I go to blur gaussian blur and I blur the edge for this particular size image 2048 right about 12 10 12 something like that should give you enough blur so that we've created our IMAP let's save it in Photoshop if you're using a later Version Control Alt s I'm going to select JPEG to begin with because there's our current diffuse you know I just click on that and then just rename it so now to type it all in this one is going to be height and then I need to change this to PNG so click on Save okay so that's our height map done now back in blender this is going to be a little more involved although we can just click on that duplicate it with shift d bring that down here don't forget to connect the vector up just so all tab is I'm going to select the height map always put your color space on non-color for anything other than the fuse and I'm going to drag this to the displace height keep that on point five normally you would put something like .01 for your scale and then drag displacement over to the material output displacement now you might not see much happen there's a slight discernible difference but can't quite put your finger on it can you that's okay there's a few things we need to do firstly over here if we click on the materials tab here the materials properties tab I should say and scroll down to the bottom here where settings are located where you see displacement under surface make sure that it is displacement and bump not just pump only still nothing happening no problem at all you need to be in Cycles mode to see this so if we click on the rendering mode up here going back to the rendering properties up here making sure that's selected make sure that the engine is Cycles now I can definitely see a difference on Suzanne I can't see a difference on this block here and that's because we haven't added a subdivision surface modifier yet so if I add this in I'll go for something quite High eight Maybe keep it on SIMPLE keep it squared very difficult to tell whether it's made much of a difference so let's exaggerate the displacement let's go for point one on the scale ah that's gone crazy hasn't it but you can see now it is displacing but dark areas are assessed the light areas are protruding or extruding so if I bring that down to a level that looks mighty fine maybe 0.025 or something like that yeah something like that I think maybe will do for the displacement maybe a tiny bit higher with those three fights you may need to experiment with that and I'm going to give my GPU a rest I can hear it whirring away I don't know if it's picking up on the mic so I'm going to click on the material preview you can't see displacement in the preview and yes my GPU is now calming down a little so back in Photoshop we have our height map sorted again this is going to be a basis for so many other texture files let's keep this one maybe what I could do is if I go to open control o i could duplicate this file here renaming the duplicated copy um how about and that's going to hold the text ring and then I'll duplicate it again I'll call this one normal now normal's going to look completely different by the time we finished with it don't worry I got duplicate it one more time and create another one called Smooth and I'm going to load all of these up I think one of them's already loaded the height one but there we go just those three then so they've got the bump normal and smooth now let's look at the smooth first because the smooth is going to control the roughness or smoothness of our bricks and mortar now the way it works in blender the dark areas tend to be smooth the lighter areas tend to be the rough at the moment if I was to put this into blender as it is so within blender if I was to come to the roughness and add in an image or duplicate an existing image that's fine just connect Vector up there open and then go over to smooth making sure of course my color space is set to non-color can we see what's happened there let's see if I can find a good example aha here we go so looking at this now you can see there's definitely a reflection going on on the mortar almost glass like and nothing going on on the brick so we need to reverse that the quickest way of doing that in Photoshop is by holding out of control and hitting I to invert our image effectively turning it into a negative save that let's try this in blender snooze now we have the exact opposite the mortar is rough or matte and the bricks are now very very glossy way way way too glossy so let's turn down that glossiness I'm Gonna Keep It All image based I'm not going to have any other notes doing anything special here I could bring in a color ramp into all sorts of crazy things but I'm going to keep it all image based so that it's easier to transport into other 3D applications so going back into Photoshop levels Ctrl L and I'm going to bring in the output levels Black Point right up like that maybe something like a mid gray which will give us like a mid level of glossiness roughness save it going back into blender let's just update that file several ways you can update which is a very quick easy way I think that looks good now so we've got the roughness of the mortar but there's a slight hint of something going on with the brick so that smoothness done let's just put that in a nice neat place let's drag these up a little making a bit of room because now we're gonna move on to bump just for quickness select that shift d bring down our copy and this one is going to be our bump back into Photoshop I'm going to move over to my prompt file here now bump isn't as specific on decks as a height map it's more about the finer detail so what I would do is go over to my brick diffuse I'm going to select everything Ctrl e Ctrl C to copy it and then come over to my bump paste knock all the color out of control U Hue and saturation saturation down to -100 and then perhaps reduce the opacity of this a little so there's a little bit going on actually I've got a really clever idea how about this they're about to see a background layer invert it not sure it's going to work or not there's going to be a point where the mortar is going to be the same color as the brick perhaps about there so we don't really want there to be that much of a difference yeah that'll do you might want to play around with it you want effectively a fairly neutral image texture for this you don't want there to be deep recesses and shadows and whatnot you just want it to be lots and lots of texture so you can see there I've neutralized a lot of the Shadow just by playing around with opacity and inverting things so that I think will do one thing I also like to do is very slightly blur a bump map but before I do that I'm going to make sure I go to view pattern preview if you're ever messing around with blurring and various other textures make sure you're in pattern preview if it's a tiny texture just so that photoshop knows to continue on that effect into the tiling so filter blur oh I'm gonna go for gaussian blur and put this on a very low radius maybe something like 0.5 see that's almost indesertable okay and then I'll flatten it all your layers are one make sure it's definitely the right file you're dealing with which is the bump and save back in blender how about I'll just duplicate this one shift d bring it up here select my bump color space not in color of course and I'll drag this point out here and choose bump height here we are and put the normal into the normal on the principal bsdf oh dear oh dear oh dear we need to link up the vector of course so firstly let's turn down the strength of our bump I normally go 0.1 or 0.2 and at the most so that will just add a little bit of texture in there maybe if I come to a highlighted area where you can actually see this texture yeah 80.2 or do in this particular case adds a little roughness now we have already created a normal map file but we've done nothing with it so let's go back to photoshop and here we have our normal map normal map I think works well as a height map however before we start converting it over to a format that blender's going to understand I want to add a little bit of detail I like to make a normal map I'd start off with the on the basis of it being somewhere in between a bump and a height let me show you what I mean by that so if I go to my bump map Ctrl a select all copy and then come over to my normal map and paste and then reduce the opacity right down so we have something like that perhaps where you can see there are there's definitely height information in here but at the same time there's a fair bit of texture as well I'm just going to flatten that control e is a good way of flattening your selected layers by the way just for Speed now if I save that this is ready to go not ready to go in blender but it's going to be good to go in an app that I'm about to show you at the beginning of this video I said that there would be two applications that we're using Photoshop and blender I lied there's a third one which I'm going to strongly recommend you use and there's a great little program I use all of the time called the normal map generator and there are lots of other ones out there on the market this one's a free one I think I downloaded it from GitHub links in the description now this app is so quick so easy to use and it produces really good quality normal maps and a normal map if you don't know is a way of simulating the effect of highlight low light depth within your material and this app is just great at doing that so in the normal map generator if I click on load and I look for my normal file this one here click on open I need to click on the normal map tab up here and it's generating a normal map for me and that's what a normal map looks like very blue pink and turquoise not quite ready yet for blender there's a certain standard in blender that you really ought to stick to um it needs to be an opengl normal map and the way to achieve this is by underneath the normal map tab you need to click on the advanced settings so ball needs to become pre-wit under method also you quite often need to invert the height the turquoise needs to be at the top the purple needs to be at the bottom and the pink needs to be on the right and the blue needs to be on the left that is a standard normal map it's going to work well in blender if you're uploading things to blender kit and CG Trader it's a good standard to go for so just make sure you click on advanced settings pre-wit under your method you may need to use invert height if you find when you bring this into blender everything's recessing when it should be extruding then just come back and make sure that you change invert height also you could change the height of the large detail over here so if you want this to stick out a little more if I just exaggerate that you can see you can go crazy but most the time I just leave that on one that's absolutely fine okay save maps you can have multiple maps at the same time which is good okay that's going to replace this one here rather oddly this app that I'm using tends to put underscore normal on the end of normal Maps automatically so you'll end up with bricks hyphen 4 underscore normal underscore normal if you're not careful so I'm going to get rid of all of that and if I click on Save and Go back to blender and make a bit of space I'll drag that down here duplicate this and I look for my normal file we see already it's already enabled it with underscore normal so that's Grand so I'm going to choose that and do all the usual Vector to Vector making sure that it is set on non-color as far as the color space is concerned and I can connect the color to the normal but I'm missing something in between here shift a s for search if I just type in normal and choose normal map and drop that in between that gives me proper control over the normal map and without it the normal map doesn't quite work as it should I don't know if you can see that maybe if I exaggerate this a little more if you get the idea you get the hint that we're dealing with a three-dimensional texture here drop it down back to wonk if there we have it let's have a look at this now in Cycles Render so if I click over here give it a second or two just to calculate wowzers that's looking good this is a fully tiling texture with displacement with normal with bump with roughness with diffuse and all of that done within Photoshop and then just compiled all brought together within a PBR material within blender I hope you enjoyed this tutorial if you like it don't forget to like it don't forget to subscribe if you haven't subscribed and please do share hit the notification Bell if you want notifications of more videos as I post them and I think I'll see you on the next one thank you

Channel: Blender Bones

Views: 5,445

Keywords: pbr, material, texture, blender, adobe photoshop, pbr materials, photo-texture, how to, blender textures, blender materials, blender pbr tutorial

Id: 6sz2K1OMkGA

Length: 39min 33sec (2373 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2023