How to Setup Texture Maps in Blender For Beginners (Tutorial)

in this tutorial i'm going to show you how to properly set up texture maps in blender so i'm going to show you how to properly add the different texture maps that you would download from like a texture website so things like the color map the normal map and the roughness map i'm going to show you how to properly plug them into blender's materials so that you can get very photo realistic textures so we're going to be doing three of them so the first one that we're going to do is this wood texture right here i'll show you how to set this up and then i will show you how to set up a metal material now metal materials are pretty much the same but they are a little bit different because you have a metallic map and so the metallic map is actually going to tell blender where it's going to be metal and where it's not and then i'm also going to show you a super easy texturing method which i like to do and it works really good for random textures like dirt textures or rock textures and things like that and you don't even have to unwrap your mesh using this cool texturing method that i'm going to show you now the textures that i'm going to be using for this tutorial are from ambient cg and this website used to be called cc0textures.com but they recently changed the name to ambient cg so if you've watched my other tutorials you've probably seen me use textures from this website before because these textures are super super high quality you can see here the license of the textures are all cc0 so creative common zero so that is super awesome and i can use them for my tutorials and i just want to give a quick shout out to their patreon page if you'd like to help support them i'm sure they would appreciate it because their textures are super super high quality and i use them for many of my projects so definitely check out their patreon if you'd like to help support them alright so back over here on the texture maps i'm gonna have links in the video description to these three different textures if you'd like to download the same ones that i'm downloading now for the download i am going to be using the jpg version so you can see it there are png versions and jpg versions the format of the image textures are just jpeg or png i prefer to use jpeg because the file size is smaller and they don't really look that different i would just stick with jpeg now you can see that there is 1k 2k 4k and 8k and on some of these other ones there's even like up to 12k or 16k that is really really crazy but for these textures i'm just going to be using the 4k version i found that 4k is pretty good it's pretty high quality but it's not like an insanely high quality if you're using these textures for something that's kind of far away in the background of your scene then 1k or 2k i'm sure would be fine but i like to download 4k that's usually fine for most things that i'm doing so for these three textures i'm just going to be downloading the 4k jpeg so you can just click on it and then a download link will appear i'm just going to click on save file and then click on okay alright so just download whatever textures you want to download or maybe you already have some textures that you just want to use in blender we're now ready to hop over to blender and actually add these textures in real quick though before we continue i want to thank sketchfab for sponsoring this video buy sell and even upload your own 3d models on sketchfab my favorite feature of sketchfab is that you can preview 3d models in your browser and even view them on a phone tablet or in ar and vr they also have a huge 3d asset store where you can purchase 3d models and assets check out sketchfab with the links in the description alright so here i am in blender and what i've done is i just grabbed this rock 3d model you can just use whatever models you want and then i also just added this cylinder right here and then i also just added a plane and i'm gonna use these for the rock texture the metal texture and the wood texture and then i went over to the shading tab and i just split the window and i have the nodes right here and then this one over here this is going to be the 3d viewport so that you can actually preview the textures okay i'm going to press z and move my mouse up to go into the rendered view so that you can see the 3d models in the rendered view and i'm using the cycles render engine but if you'd like to use ev this will totally work for eevee as well and then one last thing i wanted to go over to get even more realism i added in this studio small 0-1 1k hdr and this is on hdri haven so if you'd like to download the same hdri that i'm using i will have the link in the video description so on the world here i just changed the color by clicking right here i just changed it to environment texture and then i just clicked on open and i opened up the hdri that i downloaded and then i just set the strength to two to make it very bright all right now i just hopped over to my file browser because i wanted to talk about the actual files that you're going to get when you download the textures so when you download the textures you're going to get them in a zip file now i am using the linux mint operating system but if you're using windows or mac it should work the same what you're going to do is just right click on the zip file and then there should be an extract button so i'm just going to click extract here and then it just extracts these into folders so once you extract all the zip files there's going to be these folders and you can just go into them and then here are the actual texture maps so let me just go over all the different texture maps if you're not familiar with what they are so you can see that there is the metal 022 and then there's also the 4k and that is telling you what the resolution is so if i just click on the properties right here i can just open this up and go to the image and you can see right here the width and the height it's 4096 pixels by 4096 pixels and that is the resolution of a 4k texture so it has the 4k there to tell you it's a 4k texture it's about 4000 pixels by 4000 pixels and then there is the other part of the name there is the color there is the displacement there is the metalness there is the normal and there is the roughness now when you download texture maps they're not always going to have these texture maps every texture map is probably at least going to have a roughness normal and color those are the three main ones these three but for most textures they're just going to be a roughness normal and color so if i just click on this to open it this is the color map so if i zoom in here you can see it's very detailed this is the data of the color and then let me just close that and go to the next one so this is pretty straightforward it's just the color map and when you put this in this is the data that blender will use to show the color of the texture all right let's go to the next one so the next one is displacement now the displacement map we're not actually going to be using in this tutorial because it's a little bit more advanced there are tutorials online on how to use displacement maps if you'd like to use them but for most things that you're going to do you're actually not going to use these so what the displacement map does is it actually uses this data here these black and white values and it tells it to actually bump the mesh out so it actually uses the geometry of the mesh what you do is you actually subdivide your mesh and make it very high detail and then this map you use this map to make the little points the little vertices to actually bump in or out and displacement textures are super super useful when you're doing something like bricks or maybe you're doing some pebbles or some boulders it's really helpful for when you need the geometry to actually be bumping out of your object so yeah like a brick wall or something like that there's going to be these big pieces of bricks or something like some pebbles or some rock something like that alright so let's go over to the next one now the next one is the metalness map now the metalness map doesn't come in all textures it only comes in textures that have a metallic value so because this is a metal texture it's going to have data here these black and white and it's going to tell it where it's going to be metal and where it's not going to be metal so when we plug this into blender blender is going to see the white parts and it's going to go oh that is metal so i'm going to make it a metal shader and make it shiny and then the black parts it's telling blender oh that's not going to be metal and blender's not going to treat those areas as a metal material so this is super super useful for metal textures but for things like wood or rock or dirt you're not going to be using this so that's why these other three ones these are the main ones and these two you just use them some of the time all right so that is the metalness map it tells it where it's going to be metallic and where it's not going to be metal so let's go over to the next one this is probably the coolest one and this is the normal map so remember i was telling you about the displacement map the displacement map actually displaces parts of the vertices the normal map is similar in that it gives the effect of looking like the material comes in or out so if like there's some little bumps maybe on a rock texture or like this metal texture where the rust is is going to be going in a little bit or on something like a wood texture in between the pieces of wood it's going to be dipping down a little bit what the normal map does is it basically makes a fake bump so it actually tells the shader to change the light and make it look like it's bumping down even though it's flat it's basically a fake bump so it's not actually changing the shape of the mesh but it appears that it's changing the shape of the mesh so it changes how the light interacts with the shader so it's super super cool and using normal maps can really really help to make your shaders look way more realistic so yeah normal maps are super super awesome now we'll talk about the last map so the last map is the roughness map again this is super super important for photorealism so when you plug this in it's going to tell blender where it's going to be more rough and where it's going to be more shiny so if you think about like some metal object or some super super shiny object maybe like a super super shiny piece of metal or maybe like some shiny plastic that's going to be very reflective whereas if you think about something like brick or dirt or rock unless the rock is wet it's probably not going to be very reflective it's not going to be very shiny so what the roughness map does is it tells blender where it's going to be more shiny and where it's going to be more rough and you probably guessed this but where it's more shiny is where the metal parts are and then it's more rough where the rust is so that is it those are all the maps and if i just hop back out here and go into the rock one you can see the rock one it has all of them although it doesn't have the metalness map because there isn't any metallic values now there also is another one here which is ambient occlusion and again this one you're not really going to use very often basically what this does is it gives an ambient occlusion look so it takes the part of the textures that are kind of dipping in like the little cracks and crevices you can see right in here like in this rock uh texture there's all these little cracks and crevices and it makes those a little bit darker and then the uh parts that are coming out like these little ridges right here it makes those lighter so that is like the look of the ambient occlusion again you're not going to use this for most things that you're doing but it is useful in some cases and then let's just go back out here and go to the wood one so you can see again on the wood one here's the color and the displacement and you can see for this wood texture there actually is a metalness map now not all wood textures have metalness maps but this wood texture actually has some nails going into the wood and because nails are made out of metal there's a little bit of metalness there so if i just go right over here and then zoom in here you can see like there's some little nails there so they added in a metalness map we're not going to be using it but you could use it if you'd like to so those are all the maps hopefully now you have a decent understanding of what they do i will now go back to blender and we can actually put these into our material alright so back over to blender let's first start with the wood texture so i'm just going to click on this and then we can just click new right here and this is going to add a new material so basically blender uses nodes to create its shaders and these little things right here these little boxes these boxes are the different nodes and then you have these wires here and you plug the wires up to each other to get the result that you want and the default shader is the principal bsdf and it does look really complex it does have a bunch of different settings here a bunch of things you can change but if this seems really confusing and overwhelming don't worry most of the settings here you're not really going to change for most things that you do you're just going to leave these as the default so for now just leave them at the default so you can see on this principle bsdf there are different things here there's like the base color and you can see there is actually a color for this so if you just click on that tab and change it it's going to change the color there also is the metallic value so you can slide this up and down so if you want to be metal you could do that and then there are a lot of them but i'm just going to go over the main ones so there there's also this roughness here so if you turn this up or down it's going to be more shiny so you can see that looks like shiny metal or it's going to be more rough and now it looks like very rough metal and then you can see there's also a normal one here now the normal one it doesn't really have any slider because you have to use a texture so you can just play around with these sliders but if you want to actually use textures what you do is you actually add the image textures right here and these are going to be separate nodes and then you're going to use these wires and plug them into these different sockets right here so what i'm going to do to add the image textures is i'm going to press shift a and shift a is going to bring up the add menu now you could also click right here over on add but i like to use shortcut keys so i'll just press shift a so you could go down here and find it but i just like to use the search so i'm just going to click on the search and then i'm going to start to type in image and you can see that there is this image texture so you can click on this and just drop it right here now another way to add in the image texture is to just go over to your file browser and then what you can do is you can just drag and drop the image texture into blender and when you add it in it's going to just add it in as an image texture so you could do that if you wanted to or you could just add an image texture and then you can just click on this open button and when you click on that open button a file browser is going to come up and what you need to do is just locate to where you have your texture saved so we're going to start out by using the wood floor color so i'm just going to click on this and then click on open image and now these two are the same exact thing i just dragged and dropped this one in let me just click on this and then i can just press the delete key to delete it so we have this node here and then what we want to do is we want to plug it up to the base color now before we continue i want to introduce you to the node wrangler add-on you don't need to download anything or install it in the blender you just need to click on edit and then just go to the user preferences and then in the user preferences you can just click over on this add-ons and then over on the add-ons there is a search right here so on the search you can start to type in node and you can see that there is this node wrangler add-on i'm just going to click to turn it on click on the check box and this is built into blender so you don't have to like install anything externally or anything like that it's built into blender and then if you want to save this so that the node wrangler is activated in your future blender projects you can just click on the save preferences button it's right behind me or the auto save preferences might be on and that way it'll auto save the preferences so that this is in all of your blender files all right you can just close the user preferences now so now that i have the add-on turned on what you can do is you can use this add-on to actually preview different parts of your material setup so what i can do is i can hold down the control and shift key and click on a node what that's going to do is it's going to add this viewer node and then it's going to plug this up so now you can actually preview just that node instead of previewing the principle bsdf you can just preview that image texture and now if you look around here you can see that you are able to see the texture on the model and one other really important thing before you start texturing it's important that you've uv unwrapped your mesh so i'm not going to go too much into uv unwrapping in this tutorial if you'd like to learn the basics of uv unwrapping i have a tutorial on that it's in my complete blender beginner tutorial series i'll leave a card up there on the screen and i'll also leave a link in the video description if you'd like to check out that video and that video is for beginners and i just go over how to do uv unwrapping in blender because basically what uv wrapping is is it's telling the image texture how it's going to be placed on the model because on default your models do have a uv layout but when you're doing modeling like for instance this i changed some things up here you're going to have to uv unwrap this to tell it how you want it to be placed on the model so again if you're a beginner to uv unwrapping in blender i'll leave a link in the description you can check out my beginner tutorial on how to do uv unwrapping in blender so you can see that we are able to see our image on our object and that is really great but if i control shift and click on the principled vsdf this is actually going to use all the reflections and the lighting and the roughness and the normal and all that kind of stuff and you can see that right now it's just white or if you want to change this color it's going to be whatever color it is so what we need to do is we just need to take a wire and we need to plug it up to the base color and that way it's going to tell blender to not use the color but to use the image instead so what you can do is you can click right here on this color and then drag click and drag and it's going to add this wire and then you can just drop it on the base color now you can see that it has reflections and it's interacting with the light and that looks really great so there we go our wood texture is plugged up and that's pretty much it for this image texture it's pretty easy you don't really need to change any of these settings or anything do make sure that the color space is set to srgb because if you use these other ones they're not going to work as well for the color if you're using a color map it's best just to use the srgb on the color space but that is set on default to srgb alright so there it is for the color but you can see that it's not actually that realistic because if you look really close it almost just looks like this is like a piece of paper and the image texture has been like printed on it it doesn't really look very realistic because with a real texture there are the bumps and grains of wood there's also some places where it's more rough and there's some other places where it's less rough so that's where the other maps come in so what you can do is you can again just click and drag on your file browser so i'm just going to click and grab the roughness map i'm going to drag over and let go and it's going to add in the roughness map so you may have guessed what we're going to do what we're going to do just bring this up bring this up here if i control shift and click on this you can preview it and it's a black and white map but this is the data that's going to tell blender where it's going to be more rough and where it's going to be more shiny so you probably already guessed it but what we're going to do is just take the color and plug it into the roughness the color is going to be plugged into the roughness and now you can see that some parts are more rough and some parts are more shiny and so that is going to add a bunch of realism because in the real world some parts of objects are more rough and some parts are more shiny now one really important thing is you need to make sure on this roughness map that the color space it needs to be set to non-color data if you set it to srgb there's going to be some issues now you may have not noticed any change but there can be a lot of issues and especially when you're using other maps you may notice it that there's causing issues i know you can't really see anything right now but any texture map that isn't contributing to the base color needs to be set to non-color data so this wood floor color this one needs to be srgb so that it can actually use the color because if you set to non-color you can see now that looks all weird the colors are all messed up so again just make sure the color map is set to srgb but then every other map so roughness normal displacement all that kind of stuff that needs to be set to non-color data because it's not actually contributing to the base color alright so now we are ready to add in the last map we're going to be adding in the normal map so again from my file browser i'm just going to click and drag and drop it right in here now again just set make sure this is set to non-color data it seems like blender did it automatically i don't know for sure but i think maybe blender checks the name of it and it can see that there is a normal in it so it changed it to non-color but if it doesn't do it automatically just make sure this is set to non-color data so the color we're going to plug this into the normal and now i can control shift and click back on the principle something does not look right that doesn't look good at all if you zoom in here you can see it's definitely doing something like it looks like the floorboards are actually kind of coming in but something looks very very weird it's like super shiny and there's some weird shading issues now why this is is it's because we actually need to convert this into data that the principled shader can use so you can see that on this normal map there is the color and it is a yellow dot we are plugging this yellow dot into a purple dot and that is not what we want now for the roughness map that's totally fine it's fine that this yellow one is going into this gray one but this one because it's color data and we're plugging it into normal data there isn't anything to convert it to data that the principled shader can use so we need to add a node in here to convert it to normal data so to add that node i'm going to press shift a and i'm going to search for a normal map so just click on the normal map node and i'm just going to drop it down here so this color here we need to click on this and drop it into the color and then this normal we need to drop it into the normal here and you can see the input is the yellow one but the output is the purple one now also really quick if i just plug this back you don't actually have to manually plug it up and then plug it up you can just click on the normal map and then just drop it in and it's automatically going to plug it up so now you can see because we've done that we've added this normal map if i zoom in here you can see that looks way better and look how realistic it is so normal maps are really really great for photo realism if you zoom way in here there's all these little bumps on the grain of wood it feels like if you rubbed your hand along it you'd feel those little grains of wood and you can also see there's all these dips here um like in the middle of the floorboard so that looks really great so normal maps are super helpful to get more photo realistic textures but you can see here if i go back into the solid view by pressing z moving my mouse over to solid and then letting go you can see that there actually isn't any bump it's just a flat plane but then if i go into the rendered view or the material preview blender is faking the bump so it's using this data to fake it and make it look like it's bumpy even though it's not so it's super super awesome normal maps are very helpful so there we go that is it this is how you properly set up a basic material so again let me just go over this there is the color you add this in make sure it's set to srgb because we're using color and then that will be plugged into the base color on the principle then you add in the roughness map i can just control shift and click on it to preview it this one because it's not contributing to the base color you're going to set this to non-color and then this color is going to go into the roughness and then you can add in the normal and again this one needs to be set to non-color and then we plug it up but then we need to add a normal map node to convert it to normal data now there's just a couple things i want to show you i want to show you how you can manually change or edit the material so for instance what if you like this wood but it's just a little bit too red or maybe not red enough maybe you want to change the colors a little bit what you can do is you can actually add in nodes here which will change the color before it goes into the base color so to do this i'm going to press shift a and you can go down to color here and you can see there's a bunch of different colors you could just add whatever one in you want what i'm going to do is right over here on color i'm going to use the rgb curve so i'm just going to click on this and you can see here is the rgb curves and what i want to do is i just want to stick it right in here so i'm just going to click to place it and it's going to add it in here so if i control shift and click on this here is our color i can control shift and click on this and here is our rgb curves and what this does is it actually edits the colors of the image now nothing's happening right now it doesn't really look any different and that's because we haven't changed anything but what you can do is you can click and drag up or down you can go into this corner or to this corner and what it's going to do is going to change the brightness so if you want to drag it up it's going to make it brighter or you can drag it down it's going to be darker and you can just change that you can also click on this x button if you want to get rid of it so this is a really easy way to just edit the colors if you just don't really like it like maybe you want the wood texture to be a bit darker that's super easy to do you can also click on this r that's going to change the red values so then you can change this if you want to be more red you can also click on the g for green and then you can just click and drag if you want there to be more green or less green and then you can click on the b and that is for blue and then you can drag up and down if you want to make it more blue or less blue you can now ctrl shift and click on this and you can see that now it looks like a darker wood color now i don't really want this because i just like it how it is but i just wanted to show you that if you want to edit the colors i'm just going to click on this and then press x to delete it and then i will just plug the color back up to the base color now you can actually edit the roughness and the normal as well so for instance if you want to make the shinier parts even more shiny or the rough parts even more rough you can do that so what you would do is you would put in another node here to change that so i'm going to press shift a and i'm going to click on the search here and i'm going to search for a color ramp node i'm just going to click on the color ramp note and just drop it right here and then i can control shift and click on this to preview it so if you want everything to be more rough you could just make everything lighter and then it's going to be more rough so with this color ramp here you can click on this little white tab and you can drag it forward and you can see it's going to make everything more rough so now if i control shift and click on this you can see it's still a little bit shiny but not nearly as much so if you didn't like how shiny this is you could turn it up and now it's less shiny and that's a really easy way to edit the texture on the other hand though if maybe you want it to be even more shiny like maybe you want to look like it's wet or maybe very polished you could click on this black tab and drag it and you can see that as i drag it more and more if i ctrl shift click on this it's making the texture very very dark so now if i control shift and click on the principled shader you can see it's super super shiny it's almost like a mirror so that is a very easy way to make it more shiny or more rough with this color ramp node now i like how it is with the default so i'm just going to click on this and a way to delete this while still keeping it plugged up is instead of pressing x to delete you can press control x and that's going to delete it but keep this plugged up all right so that is how to edit the roughness now if you want to edit the normal you can do that as well so this is super easy to do what you just do is you take the strength the value here and you turn it up or down now you could turn it up if you wanted to but i wouldn't really recommend it because once it's higher than one it can start to look kind of weird and distorted it doesn't look super realistic so you can see if i just turn this up to like 10 or something you can see it looks super super rough there's like all these big bumps but for instance if i just change this back to one if you want to be even smoother like maybe you want to look like a very very polished wood the strength here the default is one but you could turn it down by clicking on this and then turning it to maybe like 0.5 and now you can see it's only half as strong if you want to be very very subtle you could also change it to like a point one and you can see that now it still has some bump but it's very very subtle now i like the default i like how the texture originally is so i'm just going to change it to one but if you wanted to you could change the strength of that so those are three ways to manually edit your material if you'd like to do that so there we go that is the basics of how to set up materials in blender let's go over and do the next one now so you can get in some more practice and i'm also going to show you how to use the metallic texture and then we'll also do this rock one so i'm going to click on new here and we can just call this metal or you don't have to name it if you don't want to now again you could just press shift a and you could just search for an image texture and then click on open to open it up but it's actually a lot quicker just to click and drag and drop it in from your file browser so i'm just going to drag in the color and then remember this one needs to be set to srgb so we will click on the color plug it into the base color and there we go already it's starting to look metallic so let's do the same thing as we did before so i'm going to click on the roughness drag it in and drop it in here all right now remember the color space because this isn't contributing to the base color it needs to be set to a non color and we will just plug this color up to the roughness all right so if i control shift and click on this you can see what it's doing so it's kind of gray and then i can control ship and click on this and you can see it's a little bit hard to see from this view let me just try to get a better view of it there we go so you can really see that now where there is metal it's really shiny you can see it's reflecting right there but then where it is rough where that rust is it's not shiny at all it's actually very very rough all right let's do the last one so this normal i'm going to drop this in here and then the color we're going to plug this up to the normal and then again make sure this is set to non-color data and you can see it looks very weird and there's some issues and that's because we need to press shift a click on the search here and then start to type in normal map you can just click on the normal map and then just drop it right here and that's going to convert it to normal data and there we go if you zoom in here you can see there's all these bumps and stuff and that looks really cool alright so we've set up the color the roughness and the normal but remember there was that other one there was the metallic one i'm going to show you how to use that so i'm just going to drag these down just so we have a little bit more room here and then i'm going to drag this up because you can see the metallic value is right here now you could just drag this all the way up and make it all metal and that actually looks pretty good but these parts are metallic whereas rust isn't really metallic so you could turn this all the way up to one for metal materials that's totally fine but it's better to use the metalness map so i'm just going to click with my file browser and drag over and drop it in and then i need to make a little bit more room so i'm just going to bring these up now again remember this needs to be set to non-color data because it's not contributing to the base color and then just like all the other ones we're just going to take the color and plug that up to the metallic and you can see what it does it basically just makes the metal parts metallic but then the rusty parts it makes those not metallic it just makes those the regular shader so there we go it's pretty easy to set up just like all the others just make sure it's set to non-colored data and then just plug it into the metallic alright so we've already done two of them but let's go ahead and do this last one so on this rock here i'm just gonna click on new to add a new texture now remember that node wrangler add-on that we turned on at the beginning of the tutorial well that node wrangler has a super super awesome feature and what it does is it automatically adds in all the textures for us now i didn't talk about this until now because i think it's very important that you properly understand how these all work and then you can manually change it if you want to or do things like that so let me just click back over on the rock here but as i was saying the node wrangler add-on actually has a feature in it to automatically set up all the texture maps for you and it can save you a lot of time so to do it you're just going to click on the principal bsdf to select it and then the shortcut key is control shift t and then you're just going to need to locate to where you've saved the textures and then just select them so for this one i want the color so i'm going to click on the color and then i will hold down the ctrl key and click on the normal and also click on the roughness so these are the three maps that i want and then what you can do is you can click on the principled texture setup and when you add this in look what it does it automatically adds in all the textures you can see here's the color roughness and normal it automatically adds in the normal map and it also automatically changes these to non-colored data so that is really great now you may have noticed two things it adds in these frames right here and these are basically just a way to organize your nodes you actually don't need them i can just click on them and then just press x to delete them if you want to add a frame you can press shift a and just search for a frame and basically you can just drop nodes into them and then you can drag them around so if you want to organize this a little bit better you could like drag these in and then you can just drag them all around i don't really use frames that much so i'll just click on it and press x to delete it and then this one right here this frame i'll just press x to delete it now the other thing that you might have noticed is that it also adds in this mapping and texture coordinate and we don't have these for this material now most of the time you actually aren't going to need the texture coordinate and mapping so that's why i didn't really go over it in here just because you don't really need that on default but for some things that you're doing you might want to use the texture coordinate and mapping so basically what the texture coordinate and mapping nodes do is it tells it how do you want the texture to be placed on your object so these other objects on default they're automatically using the uv maps and again if you'd like to learn how to do uv unwrapping in blender i will leave the link in the description to the tutorial so on default they're going to use the uv which is the uv maps and then basically the mapping node can just be used to like change it so if you want to like change the location of your texture or if you want to change the rotation and scale you can change these values and it's going to change the location rotation and scale so this leads me to this super awesome super easy texturing method that i talked about at the beginning of the tutorial and what it does is it allows you to place the texture on your object without using uvs for this easy texturing method is i can change this mapping instead of using the uvs i can change this to object now when i change this to object um it looks a little bit different but you can see that there's some stretching here what i'm going to do to fix this is after changing the texture coordinate to object what i'm going to do is click right here on flat and i'm gonna change this to box so i'm gonna do that for all three of them i'm gonna change this one also to box and then i'm also gonna change this one to box and it's important that you do the same thing for all the textures because where the normal map is it needs to be the same on the color map and then that needs to be the same on the roughness map so where they are placed on the object they need to all be placed at the same location so now we've changed that to box and you can see what it's doing is it's basically just taking the texture and from all sides it's sort of like making a box around the object and then taking the texture from all sides of the box and just putting it right on the object now this doesn't work for textures that are very uniform like this like for instance something like a brick wall or some tiles or this wood texture it doesn't really work well for this because it's very random but for random textures like dirt textures or rock textures or things like that it actually works quite well now there is one problem if you look around here you can actually start to see some seams it's pretty hard to see it on this object but for instance right here you can see here's one so it's kind of a lighter rock color and then suddenly it gets a darker rock color right there and that doesn't look very realistic so what you can do to fix this is you can change the blend value so you can see when you start to turn this up what it does is it basically blends the scene in between the two areas of the texture so there's part of the texture here and there's part of the texture here and when you turn up the blend value it blends them together so the blend value i usually like to change this to like a 0.2 and then you're going to need to do that for the roughness and the normal as well so the blend value 0.2 and then the blend value 0.2 and that is it that is the super easy texturing method and what's so cool about this is this is adaptable so for instance if you tap into edit mode and then i'm just going to scroll over here and click on this button so you can't see the selection now if i scale this if i scale this out you can see it's kind of laggy but you can see that it's actually adapting to the shape of the rock so as the rock changes shape it actually adapts and there's no stretching and it looks good all around here so if you like went into sculpt mode and sculpted a part of the rock or if you just like grabbed a part of the rock and then i can just press o to turn on the proportional editing and i can just start to drag this out you can see if i just go into the material preview here and start to change this it's adapting to the rock and we don't have to worry about uvs or anything like that and it will just adapt and it looks really great so that is the super easy texturing method i use this all the time so again let me just go over this really quick what you need to do is you need to just select one of the textures and then press ctrl t and that's going to add the texture coordinate and mapping then what you need to do is the object needs to go into the vector and then you need to make sure that the vector on the mapping is plugged up to all the three of these then what you need to do after that is on all of these instead of it being flat you need to set to box so do that for all the textures and then the blend value you can set that to whatever you like i like something around point two that works pretty well and that's it so that is the super easy texturing method again it doesn't work very well on textures that have like a tiling to them but for something like this for something like rock or dirt it works really really well alright so with that all said this is going to wrap up the tutorial on how to properly set up textures in blender i hope this tutorial was helpful and thank you so much for watching if you'd like to help support this channel the best places to do that over on my gumroad store and my patreon page and over on my gumboad and patreon you can get 3d models and assets that i sell you can also get the artwork project files and tutorial files you can also get procedural materials and things like that over on my gumroad and patreon and also if you'd like to help support me here on youtube you can join the youtube memberships with the join button next to the subscribe button and that'll help to support me monthly and you'll also get some cool perks here on youtube as well but again thank you so much for watching i hope you enjoyed this video and i hope it was helpful and i will see you in a future video

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 114,710

Keywords: Ryan King Art, Blender Tutorial, Blender, Ryan King, Art, Tutorial, texturing, shader, material, beginner, texturing for beginners, texture, 3d

Id: V8ZRp3J64x8

Length: 39min 11sec (2351 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 17 2021