How to turn any photo into a KeyShot material

hey have you ever wished you could just turn any old picture into a realistic material in keyshot well today's video I've got a hack for you and I'll admit it's definitely a hack since it's not the most technically correct way to make physically based materials this is more of a quick and dirty approach to good enough results so today I'll show you my system for turning pretty much any old photo into a decent looking material in keyshot alright here we are in keyshot in the material practice scene which you can grab for free from the file Vault if you want to follow along I want to jump into camera number two this on the left is the blank slate that we're going to use to create our new material on so I'll double click on it so we can edit that material and I want to open the material graph since this is where most of our work is going to happen on the right side we see a root node and on the left we see a material node we know it's a material node because it's plugged into the surface socket of the root node double click the diffuse node and change it to a plastic type of material we are going to use a plastic for the base but because it has all the properties we need to create a convincing looking wood material I want to change the diffuse color to Black next I want to bring our texture in that we'll be using for our material now I want to grab the white dot on the right side of this this is an outbound socket and I want to plug it into the white dot next to the word diffuse now instead of a solid black color we have the color being driven by this image texture next I'll double click the texture node to make sure it's mapped correctly we'll use box mapping that's fine but I want to change it from Center on model to Center on part this will align the middle of the texture with the middle of our part I also want to rotate it so I'll go to angle UV and I'll type in 90 which will just rotate it around the center now to modify the way this texture looks I want to use a utility node so I'll click on the connector here and right click go to utilities and color adjust this gives me another node that will change the color of this texture as it is applied to the plastic so the main thing I want to here is darken it up a little bit and I also want to add some color it's a little too bland for me so I'll go ahead and click on the colorize option and I'll go for like a nice Brown kind of like a rich brown color now the first thing you might notice is we have a bright sharp reflection running right across this this tells us that the surface of this is perfectly glossy smooth we need to fix that before we do that I want to click on the connector going into the diffuse channel right click and disable this is going to go back to a glossy black next I want to connect another outbound socket from that texture to the specular Channel basically what we're doing is we're using this texture to control how much light gets reflected off of this surface so we're going to insert another node between the texture and the specular Channel and this one is called a color to number we're going to spend a lot of time using this so I'm going to slow down and explain how it works works first of all click on this node make sure it's got an orange band around it and hit C on the keyboard this gives us a color preview and will be a lot easier to see what we're doing so the way this node works is we are taking the color of the image texture and we're converting it to a numerical value which is represented in grayscale we have zero representing black and one representing white now we may not have pure black or Pure White on this texture but we can remap these values as we need to using this node our input from into represent the darkest and the brightest values of this texture darkest is a zero and the brightest values are a one and the output from into represent the darkest and brightest values of this texture that are going to be passed on to this plastic and therefore will control the specular value now if I don't make any changes to these values the blacker or darker areas will reflect less light than the wider areas will so if I get out of this preview we will see that the darker areas that are not reflecting as much light and there's brighter areas that are reflecting more light all the while the surface is still perfectly glossy smooth so this is not roughness we'll get to that in a bit back in our color to number we want to make these darker areas lighter and maybe lighten up the whole thing overall if we take the output from which is at zero we'll take those black values and we'll make them lighter and if we take the output 2 and start to increase it we'll make the overall brightness of this even lighter closer to White so I've gone ahead and increased the brightness of this texture so the point of where we barely can see a difference between them but it's a very light grayscale image texture when I get out of that preview we still see what looks like the wood texture but in fact this is just the amount of light being reflected off of this surface now before we continue if you're enjoying what you're learning here then you'll love my upcoming material Master Class course I'm going to share everything I know about creating materials in keyshot it's going to be epic now before we move on I want to disable the specular connector and we'll grab another outbound socket and plug this one into roughness but wait we don't see a roughness well if you let go of the connector right on the plastic node it will give you the option for every possibility and will choose roughness and at this point we're going to use yep you guessed it another color to number now if we preview that color to number once again we're taking these values from the texture and converting them into numbers the way roughness works is it sees light colors of a texture like white as being a high roughness because white is represented by the value one black is represented by the value zero so the darker values here are equal to zero in this case if the roughness is zero it's completely glossy now in this example we have these darker grains of our wood which are a little bit recessed and if we were to look at the reference photo of this wood material we would see that those darker areas here are actually a little bit less reflective and less shiny so we don't want as much light being bounced out of those dark recesses so the way we'll do that here using the roughness is we want to make these darker areas white and these wider areas dark so we can essentially invert this using our color to number we'll type in one for the output from and zero for the output two by by swapping those values we essentially invert this texture now these darkest areas here are going to represent the lighter more raised areas I can go ahead and tweak this image until we get something that looks a little bit more like what I need alright so the areas that used to be the dark wood grain are now showing as a light gray and the more raised surfaces that are supposed to be smoother are showing as a black if I get out of this color to number preview we should see that we have smooth glossy areas and where the wood grain is recessed we see these kind of more rough less reflective areas here so we can play with these values until we're happy with the results obviously we don't want it to be super smooth so we're going to take that output 2 and start to increase it a teeny bit as well so at this point what I'm going for is something that almost looks like a wood grain even though we don't have the image texture showing us the color of it yet this is basically taking us from a mirror-like finish to one that's a little more realistic with some roughness in areas that are more rough where the wood grain has these little cracks in it and it's a little more smooth on the other raised areas because this is a table that has a polyurethane coating on it now before we jump into the bump texture I'm going to disable this connector as well and last but not least we're going to connect our texture into the bump Channel and the reason I saved bump for last is because people tend to rely too much on the bump texture and not enough on these other channels by default you can see this is way too strong if I double click on my texture I can reduce the bump height if I do a negative value it will invert the bump pushing in the opposite direction in this case we want to leave it a positive number but again one is too strong so let's try point one and see how that looks while this looks a lot better better it's still way too strong I'm going to go down to point zero five and the strength of your Bump height will depend on the scale of your texture bigger textures you can use a smaller value really small textures you'll have to go much higher in this case it's still too strong I think I'm going to try .02 and what I'm looking for is to try to avoid areas that are getting too bright white and these cracks shouldn't look quite so deep to my eyes I'm going to go all the way down to .01 and I think that's going to work out pretty well so there's our bump texture now the fun part is we get to enable all of our properties again let's try bringing back our roughness and see how that looks with the bump there we get a little more depth you see next we're going to go to our specular and enable that and that should control a little bit more of the light that gets reflected out of this and lastly we're going to bring back our diffuse and that should bring our color texture back in and just like that we've gone through a pretty simple process you using a few of the same nodes to get one texture to create a fairly detailed material and one that's pretty realistic so of course at this point now that we have all of our properties being driven by this texture we can go back in and make any sort of adjustments or modifications that we need to to make this look the way we want it to now if you wanted this material to cover a larger area in keyshot without repeating that would require taking the texture into Photoshop and doing further editing if you're interested in that let me know I can cover in another tutorial not every texture can easily be turned into a seamless one but the process isn't that complicated so let me know that said until next time happy rendering hello

Channel: Will Gibbons | 3D Rendering

Views: 14,607

Keywords: will gibbons, wil gibbons, will gibbins, will gibons, will gibins, keyshot, rendering, tutorial, animation, studio, freelance

Id: SDx6t72wS8I

Length: 10min 11sec (611 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 25 2022