How to make Photorealistic Materials in Blender, using the Principled Shader

this is an important announcement blender now comes built with a brand new shader the principled shader now normally when blender gets a new shader it lets you create one more type of material but actually the principal shader is the shader to end all shaders because it's basically every single shader rolled into one this thing lets you create everything from plastic to plaster and marshmallows to jelly it lets you create almost every type of known material in the real world but as well as that it also does a lot of things more physically accurate by default and therefore is automatically more realistic by default and finally it also helps artists that need to work between applications so you can now finally export something from substance painter and import it into blender and actually see consistent results between them so the principal shader is really exciting I think you're going to really like what it does so let's get into it the principal shader and how it will improve your life because it will honestly I know looking at that giant giant stream of sliders and values there doesn't exactly look easy but honestly what you see is what you get it's one of the most simple parts of blender tried honestly I was with you when I saw it I'm like oh that's going to take a while to understand like it's really simple just sliding stuff and it's done but it's also important to understand what it's actually doing and how to use it properly so that's what this whole video is about some of the stuff I'm going to discuss was previously mentioned in my PBR videos but really this new shader it supersedes that whole PBR node group setup that we created in those previous videos so that was sort of a workaround and tool blender had this very solution so if you haven't watched those videos great you don't need to if you have watched them that's still great because I'm sure you've learnt a lot about create no groups and also what goes into creating a you know physically accurate looking shadow so first of all what's the whole idea behind the principal shader where did it come from well believe it or not it was actually created by a guy at Disney when they were creating the wreck-it Ralph film they wanted a way for the objects basically materials to have consistency so that if it's in a daylight scene and then the character runs into a nighttime scene you don't have to adjust the materials like the material should just work in the lighting which it's receiving right so they wanted a consistency across the light and they also wanted to it to naturally behave like like materials do in the real world but they also at the same time wanted to give artists the freedom to break rules and have control over their material so he came up with this idea called we'll call it the principle paper remember the title of it actually I'll put it in the YouTube description so you can look at it if you want but yet was basically this idea that there would be these values here for one material and that would basically decide how the material looks and through that you should be able to create any number of materials from those those set values there so that's the idea behind the principles data it comes from Disney believe it or not obviously developed and put into blender by somebody else but yeah cool little backstory but why it's so important is that it does default for now it does proper roughness it is a methyl nurse workflow and it also does some other cool stuff some extra freebies which I'll mention at the end but in detail let's talk about those first three things okay first of all four is now or should we say three no I'm sorry I had to do that oh boy yeah it's pronounced for now okay so for now you've probably heard it before and you've probably even seen it before because every single object in the real world has for now so for now is the understanding that at the edges of an object like the more like of a tangent that you're looking at a surface on the more reflective it will be because light will bounce off that more than it will off the light which is right in front of you're looking at a ball straight on like this let's say this marble here at the edges of the ball you'll be seeing actually 100% reflection but then as it comes towards the middle you'll be seeing only around about two to five percent reflection okay and that is for every object every object has four now okay now you've probably seen this and noticed it most clearly I don't on an object like a lake okay because as you're looking across the lake where there's a greater angle so like let's say way back in the distance there it's basically a mirror just reflecting directly off what's behind it but as the angle changes and it comes further and further towards you you're actually able to look underneath the the surface of the water layer can water layer to actually see what's underneath the water right so that is for now but it's also on every single object so car paint you can see the exact same thing as the angle changes so does the reflection a coffee cup exactly the same things you just have a look around you like pick up stuff and you'll see that there's more reflection on the edges and it is in the center okay and everything has for now you might think okay yeah shiny stuff has for now but like a brick or a piece of cardboard that doesn't have for now well actually does if you look at that length I'll put it in the description as well this guy went through and took a whole bunch of photographs of different objects and even stuff like brick like a porous brick that has for now any eye and he proved it so it's really interesting you can even get it on a shirt as everything as for now which is pretty cool now the old way so the traditional way that most people make their materials and honestly the way I previously made most of my materials like every single one of my old tutorials was alright let's start by adding in a diffuse shader now a glossy shader and now we'll mix them together and that was the material right that's how we made basically every material but that doesn't take into account for now so there's an equal amount of reflection right in the center of that Suzanne which is facing the camera most as there is on the edge so it's not taking into account for an out the principled shade away takes that into account automatically you don't have to configure anything there's no fernell slider or anything you don't have to worry about it's just done in the background according to what values you've set here it's going to determine the correct for now okay so we'll get to that in a bit but I like cycle back between then you can see the difference that it has on that Suzanne monkey head there you might not notice too much of a difference just looking at this um but if you look at another example like say for example a wooden floor if you don't have Fornell which is what you wouldn't have on the non principled workflow on the left there then it has the same amount of reflection as it does in the distance right down at your feet and that's not what we're used to seeing in the real world the principal shader automatically takes that into account so that the reflection tapers off as it gets closer and closer in angle to you right so it's really clever it's really smart it's just awesome alright so the other cool thing that it does is proper roughness and this is related to the fernell that we just spoke about so how roughness works in the real world is say you're looking at an object and it's a completely shiny object right like it's a mirror okay as light hits that object because it is completely smooth it just bounces straight off it and all the Rays enter into the camera so that would be a mirror however if it is a rough object and I mean like Ross like right down at the microscopic level you would see all these little bumps there well the Rays are going to be shooting off everywhere so only some of them are going to hit the camera and when you combine that with the fernell which we just mentioned what that means is that as the roughness increases the fernell actually decreases so you'll see less for now as the roughness is increased right and you can see this very clearly I'm on these two images here and do take the scene because it took me forever to find these images online I do Google a lot of balls to try and find these I'm like all right rough ball no wooden ball I finally found it anyway you can see very clearly on the smooth shiny ball there you've got a lot of reflection right on that edge there and then very little right in the center very clear for now on that whereas the wooden ball you can't really see much of a pronoun effect it is there but there's not it's not very obvious because it is such a rough porous surface okay um so let's say for example you you created a shader using the diffuse glossy method that we mentioned before but you added for now right so you could do that you could give your object for now very very easily but your roughness as you increase or decrease the roughness there would be no interaction it wouldn't taper off the fernell as the roughness went up however the principal shader does it automatically so you don't have to worry the you know tweaking your Fornell shader anything like that it's all automatic once you increase the roughness amount you can see on the Suzanne heads there as that roughness increases it automatically decreases the for now now as I cycle back between the two you can see the difference there so that's it so that's a talk it's it's proper roughness that takes into account the the for now or proper fernell which takes into account the roughness I guess but yeah so that's it so it's really really cool the third thing and this is a really important one is that it is a proper metalness workflow metalness okay why are we talking about metal Andrew well it's probably something that you've heard of you've seen on a forum or something when they're talking about substance painter or you open up some other piece of software it says which workflow would you like to use the specular or the metalness workflow you think oh well I'm not making anything with metal so forget it you know like you don't know what that workflow is talking about it sounds like it's something else but the metal is workflow is just a way of thinking about materials because every single material in the real world it falls into one of two categories okay and those two categories are dielectric materials which is ninety percent of the materials in the world it's fabric it's ceramic it's plastic it's paint it's anything with a diffuse element to it that's a that's called a dielectric material and the other category is a metal object yeah the other 10% anything metal in the world now the reason that every single material falls into one of these two categories the reason this is important to 3d rendering is that light behaves differently between the two of them okay so for a dielectric material when the light hits this hits the surface some of the light bounces off just check in and I was actually still recording it's important some of the light bounces off and the other light is refracted and scattered around and that's how you get the diffuse component of the material however with metal it reflects light but all the reflected refracted light is absorbed into it so that's why you don't see any diffuse element to metal which means metal is 100 percent across there should be no diffused element whenever you're making something which is purely metal sounds like it can't be true but it actually is keep in mind I'm not talking about things like rust or oxidization or like dirt on metal obviously that's a dielectric component on top of metal but if it is purely metal there is no diffuse element to it which which is really crazy but yeah so it's 100% gloss and the other thing which makes it different to dielectrics is that metal materials have a colored reflection so if you've ever watched a tutorial maybe one of mine or somebody else's where they talk about the specular highlights or the reflection and they say don't add any color to your reflection don't do that that's a bad idea that's what they're talking about because dielectric materials should never have any color to their reflection however metal if you are making a metal object it does have color and there's a little slighted a you can see if I move my head out the way all the different types of colors that go through with that with metal okay so that's the difference between the two of them now the without the principal shader there was a way to have these different changes in materials in the node editor but it was a lot of work and really if you wanted to see how much work just watch my old PBR videos it talks like that's what we actually do we build this thing from the inside out very complex and then if you want an object with both dielectric and metal you would have to put them in a mixture and then control it with a map and it just gets really really complicated but thanks to the principle shader it is now literally one slider and if you want a dielectric material you just leave it at the default zero and if you're making something that's metal you just drag that slider all the way to one it is by the way zero or one usually not anything in-between because material is either dielectric or it is either metal it's not usually any value in between there but yeah really easy super simple and it just does all that stuff that I just mentioned without you having to think about you don't have to think like oh what color should my reflection me where's the reflection color thing like it's automatic it's once you tell it it's metal it just goes BAM I'm doing that like it it's a smart shader it's it's really fun so as well as that it also does some other cool stuff which I'll show you in a moment but that is subsurface scattering there's just some values there if you want to add some subsurface to your car paint or whatever it's very easy to do anisotropic so things like the back of a fry pan or brushed metal it's very easy to do that you can add Sheen which is used for things like fabric and as well as that a clear coat so I'll show you all this in just a moment but those are some other cool things that it does alright so time for a hands-on demonstration I'm open in blender with a Suzanne head here and I'm going to give it a new material I'll just open up this 3d the node editor not the 3d board and I'm going to delete this diffuse shader and I'm going to hit shift a shader and then in here you'll find a new one called principles B SDF so this is only you will only see this in blender 2.79 onwards so as other time I'm recording this there's currently only test builds available but it will be in version in the future hopefully so when you click it and bring it up but just go ahead and connect it like you would any other shadow so just drag that into the shader input and there we go now the first question you wonder is which one of these hundred controls here do I need to tweak first okay let me just make this bigger and the first thing to know is that the majority of these controls here you won't really use for most of your materials so for example subsurface right you can see these three here relating to subsurface those are three that would only apply to you know a fleshy character because it's going to be literally adding subsurface to your material right that's sort of like going through the model so the majority of your models you don't need that so it's just going to be left off and these three settings are going to be ignored so there's a few of those ones there the four that you the only four that you really need to know the majority of the time is one base color - metallic three the roughness and for the normal which is where you are good to be the bump mapping so base color pretty simply just like you are familiar with everywhere else it is the color of the shader and it is also where you would put a diffuse texture so if you downloaded texture of textures common or something like that during the time you would just walk it into the base color input right there the metallic this relates to what we spoke about before with the every single material in the world falls into one of two categories it's either dielectric or it is metal so metallic don't think of a like metallic paint think of it like metal or nonmetal right or nonmetal and metal so at zero it's at nonmetal and then if you drag it all the way to one it is now metal okay pretty simple and remember by the way that objects usually are one or the other it's very rarely that you would have any value in between there so just remember it's zero or it is one okay and the next one down there is the roughness so this roughness here is one that you'll be using a lot and that's what's going to give it the majority of its its character relating to the selection because it's going from a shop reflection at zero to a very soft smooth reflection up at one now you might be wondering Andrew I think you skipped the specular one right there right no actually this specular shouldn't really ever be adjust if you're going for photo realism because it is already at point five it is at the correct value for an object with an index of refraction at one point five which is the majority of dielectric materials now if you if you do adjust it you will notice that the reflection gets brighter and if you're all the way down you can see that the reflection is eliminated so you might think like yes sometimes I don't want to have a reflection what would I do then well if you know you're cheating you can do it sure but most of the time when you're thinking of an object it doesn't have a reflection like say a brick wall you're thinking that doesn't have a reflection what it actually does but it's as I mentioned everything has for now it just has a roughness which is incredibly high so put the specular back up point five the roughness would be what you would drag up so next time you're thinking of eliminating a reflection instead think of just increasing the roughness instead because that's really what you want to be doing because the object should have it should be having a glossy reflection to it even if it is really really really rough it should be there so don't eliminate it whenever possible just keep it there because it will you will be better off for it the only other value here by the way specular tint this is again something that you won't need to touch if you're going for photo realism because it will automatically be set at the correct value specular tint what it will do is it will take your base color and it will add it to the specular highlights meaning the reflection so if I was to turn off this so I don't know what's there you would see that the reflection here starts to get orange okay now the reason it shouldn't be used is that dielectric materials such as what we're using right now doesn't have any color in its reflection that is a strictly metallic characteristic right so you might think then okay well one is a matte like I need to make sure that I turn it up well actually went into metallic it's automatically already doing that so if you change this here you'll see that nothing actually happens so when it needs to be you know when you need specular tint it's already on by default and when you don't need it you shouldn't have it so basically I just leave that at zero all the time okay so that's we've talked about all these up here oh yeah the other thing related to reflection is the this distribution thing at the top there it's at the top seam I think it's important it's really not like have a look if I change it from multi scatter to just normal GD X what's changed like nothing I've seen like a few like comparison renders if you have a multi multi scatter versus just standard there's very very little difference between them it's just like pretty cool like additional bouncing in the reflection it's a it's a weird one just just leave it as is okay so the only other one down underneath that then is anisotropic so this is used for things like a like a fry pan you you roll over the back of a fry pan and you see that circular reflection so some specific objects have this stretched reflection and that's when that's the only time you would use that so again most of the time you would not need to use this at all and yet it is the exact same values that you would see in the actual anisotropic shader right here anisotropic rotation rotation etc so yeah don't you won't have to worry about that most time I'll just show you what it does but if you turn it up you'll see that the reflection so you can see this is ice preset this down to zero so you can see it a little better so that's what the reflection looks like before and if I turn that all the way up you can see there it's starting to stretch it in a different way and then the rotation is changing the direction in which it is stretched the other thing with that is that you would use a tangent if you were using anisotropy because you would want to make sure that it you had control over which direction that that anisotropy goes so you would go to input tangent right here if you want radial like a frypan you would choose that or UV map but that's you know again that's that for a you know another tutorial project maybe my anisotropic tutorial that I've already done anyways so I'll set those back to zero because we don't need to use them the other one Sheen and Sheen tint so this is something that I mentioned at the start was mostly useful for fabric and that's really only it's it's really only that's really it's only use if I can get the words out so I'll just very quickly I'll just create an object which most resembles something of fabric so let me just quickly do this just to show it because it does help to actually see it so that you know when to actually use it the next time if I can get there fast enough without boring everyone alright at a quick displacement to it so that I get some alright there we go so something that looks a little bit like fabric okay so something like that so that to smooth alright okay so here we've got the oh I've got dielectric oh hang on a second I've actually got to make sure that I'm using the principled shader of course which is that one right there close that and there it is okay whoo alright I swore I had that on another layer all ready to go but apparently not anyways so in order to see this what I'll do is I'll set this down to a dark color like this now seen by the sound of it it's Sheen sounds like something to do with reflection it's not okay if I turn this up you'll see that very little has actually changed so let me turn the actually I'll just turn the specular off this is one of the rare examples where I would actually want it off but I just want to focus on the scene so looking at this you can see that there's absolutely no reflection to it whatsoever so anything you see here is the sheen okay which is that very very light this is what I mean by subtle it's it's extremely extremely subtle it's a really it's not going to make much of an impact to most of your materials if you've got a flag blowing in the wind like my previous tutorial then this is a time that you would actually use it just it's a bit similar to the velvet shader I guess giving like a very slight and then cross reflection and then sheen tint what it will do is it will very subtly add in some of the original base color if you have some so if it was black you wouldn't see any difference but she in tint you can see this is with it's set to zero you can see that the tint looks I mean if the sheen looks mostly white and then if I turn it up to one you can see the sheen becomes more orangey red so again some values that you wouldn't really use most of the time so everything anisotropy and its proper rotation Sheen and Sheen tint you know going to use as most of the time and another one which you would not be using most of the time is clear coat so clear coat allows you to do something which I really haven't ever done that both I mean you could do it with blender before if you fiddle around with notes but I never really thought to use it it's it's the fact that yet in in real life there are some materials that have two levels to them right to two layers so a perfect example is some metallic car paint so if I made this metallic here but it oh you want to make sure I'm looking at the right object there we go so if I make this metallic here to look like a metallic shadow I give it a little bit of roughness like a real metallic shape of car paint would have well if this was a carpet metallic köppen you'll know that the reflection isn't smooth because you can still actually see a sharp reflection in the car so the reason that you're seeing two levels of roughness is because there's a clear coat so if I turned on clear coat you would now see that I get both of them so I get the the roughness of the original specular reflections like as they are smoothing out but on top of that I also get another layer which is the clear coat and the clear coat gloss or roughness which is what you will probably see because I just submitted this as a bug it's currently it's listed as gloss which is the invert it's the yeah it's the invert of roughness so my whole point was why don't we just switch it so that it says clear coat roughness just like that is so that you don't have to think in your head okay which slider am i moving which that has to be the opposite of this one so yeah and I just sort of comment from Bretton it looks like they're going to change it to Roughness but anyways so that would just define like how smooth the actual clearcoat is there so yeah the roughness you would just turn that up a little bit and then it would be would be smoother and there's these the only thing other related to clear coat is clickers normal so normal that's where you put in your map for the actual material and you had you can if you want have to Bart Maps you could have one bump map for your normal the material underneath it and then another BOTS map over the top which might be overkill but for some specific things like a hard lacquered wood floor you might want to have the bump of the original wood but then on top of that have like some scratches like built into it right so a few things you could do there now these other ones down here we're doing all the settings we're going through one by one so if you can hear somebody soaring outside I happen to have my office next to a warehouse where they train young guys apparently how to store things anyways so these two down here IOR and transmission so these two are linked in that if you change index of refraction like if you're used to using this you might think like hey why as I change this why is nothing actually happening to my material well this is only related to your trends your transmission so if you have transmission turned off you won't see any difference when you turn it on you might still not see a difference and that's because transmission will only work if metallic is set to zero and as well as that you should probably make sure your color because this right now when with transmission is 1 and Metallica 0 it's treating it like it is a glass shader so just like if you were to have a glass shade with an orange color it doesn't look right so I'll set that to pure white just like that so we can see it and I'll turn my roughness down and get rid of my clear coat as well so now this is behaving just like it if it was a glass shader so just as an example I'll show you this I'll add in a glass shader I'll connect this up and I'll make sure that I'm using the same value across both those index of refraction and roughness of zero and ego so it's it's exactly like using a glass shader why would you use that it's like if you're making glass why would you use this whole principled thing you might possibly sieve some refinements in the future but I think the idea is that the principled shader is supposed to be faster for most most things so maybe in the future the principal shader will be faster and glass shader right now I haven't noticed any difference but yeah it's there it's there if you wanted to yeah one of the one of the chances I mean what are the practical uses of having glass instead of glass shade I don't know so somebody will list it in the comments and say duh Andrew you missed some pretty glaringly obvious ones alright so oK we've spoken about every setting here now let's do a practical example let's let's let's texture this monkeyhead so I am on you guessed it polygon comm and we're going to use some of the new metal textures as an example so I'm going to make our Suzanne head look like a metal suzanne head right so the reason I'm using these is that these are some properly made PDR materials like you would be getting from substance painter or designer if you are using those softwares or getting from a model from somebody else in a team of artists right so each one of these if you click it open it up you will see that it's got all the maps included so diffuse displacement you've got two displacements you've got a metal nough SMAP interesting normals and a roughness map okay so it's a good a good one too to try it out on so I would download this I'll put the link in the YouTube description if you want to play along at home and one other thing before I forget it I have UV unwraps this Suzanne head as well just so I could do this for the demonstration if you try to apply textures just to normal you know the one that you get out of here you wouldn't see it applied but I'm just using it to demo something on alright give me a break so I'm going to text your image texture load an image texture and I'm going to click on open okay so once you download it you would see these textures here okay so a bunch of different ones here the first one and the one that most people are used to color or the sometimes called a diffuse texture sometimes called an albedo texture seems like the names just grow with times it's always alternatives anyways it's cold so I'm going to load this in and click open all right now I'm going to drag this into which input face color so that is where you would put anything which you want to have the base color of your material okay so you can see I've added in here doesn't look anything like metal right now but it will when we add in the next map so the next map I'm going to add in is click open oh right here is the metalness the met on this map now this is one you probably haven't used before but it's one that we're going to use right now because I want to demonstrate why this principled shader works so well because what this can allow us to do is click open and then just like you would for any map that isn't directly contributing to the color of the input make sure that you are setting the color space to non color data for every map that isn't contributing to the color all right so non color data so it's correct this if we drag this into the metallic input and check it out what we've just done is we have given our our whole monkey head we've made it look like metal except for those little black dots which are now showing through as diffuse because as you remember from the demonstration our metal doesn't have any diffuse element to it however if you've got elements on top of metals such as dirt or grime one of the things like that then you would see diffuse sorry you would see a dielectric material on top of a metal material so this allows you to do that because this is what the map looks like because white and black little dots all over it ok so we've now got that so that this this is where this really shine so this is what's sometimes called being net on this workflow if you ever see that anyway now you know what it is it's it's when you've got one shader and you're telling it part of it are metal and parts of it are dielectric so there we go all right now the next one I'm going to add in is going to make it really start to look like that original material should and that is the roughness roughness right here so I love roughness because it's where you start to give it that character that gives it so much is it so much character okay I'm just going to add this into the roughness input right there and there we go okay so now it's time to get that sort of smooth soft sort of look now you you could have done this by yourself just by moving the the slider there but this map here if you have a look at it it's a whole range of different splatters and scratches and all sorts of things made in substance designer which is which is what a real material would have and this is why it's so important to use a map because a map and all those tiny little intricacies built into it so it's way better than just using a slider so I'll connect this back to roughness like that and there we go um now specular it won't make any difference if we turn this on or off I believe actually will it contribute to the for now I don't believe it does now yeah so it makes no difference because it's metallic right so it's not going to make any difference you have no control over that unless it is dielectric so yeah so don't worry about that and don't worry about specular tip because it's doing it automatically as it should the only other one anisotropic we're not going to bother with obviously because it's not a sort of a pen Sheen we're not gonna bother cause it's not fabric clear coat we're not gonna bother because it's not putting another lacquered coat on top of it the only other one we're going to use is bot mapping so we're going to give it a normal map so I'm going to duplicate this go to open and I'm going to select normal if you get a material that has both a displacement map and a normal map you don't need to use box in fact you shouldn't use both use one or the other generally as a general rule if I'm using something which is mostly flat such as this one I would just use a normal map if I'm using something like ground like like muddy earth that's got a whole bunch of raised positions where I would use a displacement like you would use it to actually change the physical geometry of the mesh that is when I will use a displacement but for something like this normal map is fine and the reason there are two of each is that at polygon we provide the the TIF files which are these like higher bitmap images which has more data which avoids artifacts so if you've got the TIFF file use the TIFF file that's basically the only rule to remember all right so I've added it in now I'm just going to connect this up to the normal input and when I do that the shader will go ah right and that's because you need to make sure that you feed it through a normal map node like so and that's it haha now if I crank this up this will actually start to look like that lovely rust like that and that's it so this is the exact same workflow that you would use if you are making would if you were making concrete if you were making a ground like an earth ground like you obviously connect it into the displacement input like I just mentioned but this is the workflow for every single material most materials nowadays that you download or you try and make they're using this workflow so the principal shader is all you need to worry about now it's fantastic like if you were to look at a library of materials that could be made with the principal shader it would be like hundreds from everything from marshmallows down to Martian earth right it just does everything so that that's why there's so many sliders but remember you don't need to use most of them the only ones you need to remember are the ones that these four connected to right now the base color the metallic the roughness and the normal those other ones are entirely optional don't worry about specular most of the time you're not going to use it if you need to change something so it looks less shiny just increase the roughness like I like I just mentioned before right so you want to make it so that it is oh yeah just leave it at its default value of 0.5 and everything will be fine so yeah just make it like that so it looks like rubber right that has reflection but it's just hidden in there so it's it's actually correct answer probably all that other stuff all right I already talked about it I think that's the tutorial so thank you for watching if you found it useful please give it a thumbs up so that others can find it and if you want to see more tutorials like this one hit subscribe so it arrives in your closet youtube inbox right thank you for watching and I will see you next time bye

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 1,133,320

Rating: 4.9645991 out of 5

Keywords: blender, tutorial, principled, uber, shader, cycles

Id: 4H5W6C_Mbck

Length: 37min 48sec (2268 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 21 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/BlenderGuru]

Thanks for posting! Glad people liked it.

Happy to answer any questions you have.

[u/JigglyRitz]

Still wondering when 2.79 will officially release.

[u/Siahsargus]

This new principled bsdf is very similar to the "über" nodegroups made by people like remington, cynicat, and blenderguru himself. It seems like they were just workarounds for pbr workflow until this shader arrived. Now I feel like I'm going to have to clean up and delete most of my saved nodegroups.

I'm really excited for this. The roadmap to 2.8 makes it clear that this nodegroup is built around an evee/substance painter sort of workflow. That sort of real time visualization will be great for quickly previewing stuff, or making the 3d model I'm working on my desktop background.

[u/[deleted]]

Very helpful video, thanks Andrew!

[u/retrifix]

What about volumetric materials?

[u/ididntgotoharvard]

Welp, looks like I'll go and download a test build tonight because I don't want to wait. Very excited for this.

[u/Arendmon_]

How much of a game changer is this? Is this like a vastly superior way of doing nodes compared to doing it the previous way? (In a sense that, there's no real advantage of doing it the previous way?) I'm looking to get into rendering. Looks like my interest has come in the right time.

[u/Kasur1309]

Thank you so much for this video! I already learned a lot from you but this new feature is just amazing :D cant wait to try it out!