How to Use Material Nodes in Blender | Blender Basics Bootcamp Part 8

welcome back for day eight of the blender basics boot camp today we're going to create a procedural or generated wood material for a trophy case using blender's material nodes so let's get to it my name is chris folia i'm your stream scholar welcome to stream school all right you made it this far now it's time for the last big hurdle in this tutorial series and i know that nodes can be a little bit overwhelming to wrap your head around when you're just getting started but just bear with me take a deep breath put your learning cap on and let's dive in and make this beautiful procedural wood material for our trophy case so to get started i'm going to go ahead and select the trophy case i'm going to hit shift h and that'll isolate it just like we did with the trophy cup in the last video at this point i also want to go ahead and brighten our world back up just because that's a nicer way to work with materials so i'm going to go over to the worlds panel i'm going to change the strength to maybe a value of 1. here i'm going to rotate out of the camera view i'm going to zoom out and now let's go ahead and talk about what makes a nice looking wood material and for that i found some nice reference on a royalty-free stock photo website called pixels which i'll actually link that in the description down below because i was really impressed with the quality of their images so i'm gonna take this beautiful wood cabinet reference image i found drag it into my image editor and let's take a look at this so what makes a nice wood material first of all if we zoom in you'll notice there's some really fine fibers or splinters of wood those are the parts where if you took a piece of wood you broke it in half and you jammed your hand into it those would be the pointy bits that stick in your skin but if we zoom out we also have some nice bigger color splotches so to make a nice believable convincing wood material we're going to want to take a smaller noise texture and mix it with a nice bigger noise texture we're going to take that and use that as the basis to create all of our texture maps for a material so let's get started i'm going to select the trophy case go over to the materials panel and here i'm going to make a new material you're also going to notice that none of our nodes are showing up if you're like me that's because i'm panned way too far over to the left so to fix that i'm just going to hit a and just like in the 3d view i can hit period on my numpad and that'll zoom into the selection so here i'm going to go ahead and zoom in i'm going to add my very first noise texture i'm going to hit shift a go to texture i'm going to select noise texture and then just to see what this is looking like right off the bat i'm going to take the factor and i'm going to plug that into the base color so if we zoom in this is not even remotely even a little bit looking like a wood texture but first of all let's go ahead and change some parameters and then we'll get there just one step at a time so i'm gonna zoom in you're gonna notice this looks pretty blurry so to fix that i'm gonna go ahead and change the detail maybe a value of six i think looks pretty good and this is kind of like the difference between like a low resolution jpeg and a high resolution jpeg it's just a lot more finer detail in our noise rather than this blurry blobby mess at a detail level of two i'm gonna keep that at six and right here i'm also gonna warp this a little bit using the distortion because i think that'll make a more interesting wood material so for the distortion i'm gonna slide that around you notice that'll sort of like twist and twirl it a little bit and i like a value of maybe 2.2 and yeah i did kind of cheat and do this ahead of time but i think this looks pretty cool honestly right now though it looks kind of like a weird disco trippy music video background so to control this and actually make it look like a fine wood splinter grain what we want to do is control it using a nice empty object exactly like we did with our logo in the last video so to do that i'm going to hit shift a go to input i'm going to grab a texture coordinate node i'm going to snap it down here i'm going to use the object coordinate and as soon as i release my mouse you're going to notice the noise gets a whole lot smaller now it's more like a fine grain but it's still kind of like a trippy hippie texture so to fix that i'm gonna hit shift a i'm gonna add an empty and i'm gonna add another cube empty i'm gonna select the trophy case i'm gonna select the eyedropper i'm gonna select the empty object so now nothing really changed but if we select our empty and hit s shift z to scale on every axis except for the z axis we can sort of squish this noise texture down and it'll really start looking kind of like a nice wood grain or wood splinter grain of some sort so here i'm going to scale this up a little bit more vertically and just like that this is really starting to look like some wood grain i think that looks pretty cool the problem here is if we zoom out it looks like a solid gray bookcase or trophy case and that's because we need these larger color details in the wood to really sell the effect so to get that we're going to make a second noise texture so i'm going to select the trophy case i'm going to select the noise texture shift select the texture coordinate hit shift d y to duplicate on the y axis click to set it down and here i'm going to grab the factor and plug that into my base color just so we can see what's going on with what will eventually be our larger grain so immediately this looks exactly the same because we're using the exact same noise with the exact same empty object so we need to duplicate this empty object and make it bigger so i'm going to select the empty hit shift d and x to duplicate it on the x-axis just so we can differentiate the two i'm gonna snap it down select my trophy case and here i'm gonna hit the x on my empty on our larger grain you're gonna notice we get our trippy texture again and here i'm gonna select the eyedropper and select our new empty everything is going to look about the same and that's because we need to scale this empty up i'm going to take it i'm going to scale it but you're going to notice it's scaling to the 3d cursor and that's because i forgot to change that back to the object origins in the last video and these are the kinds of mistakes that happen all the time and they're super easy to fix so i'm just going to go to the drop down set that to the median point and now if i scale this empty it's going to scale on the empty center so i'm going to make this about the width of our trophy case might even hit alt g to re-center it maybe something like this and i'm also going to squish it down because we want some of that really nice warped detail in here so maybe somewhere about there you do whatever you think looks cool whoops i accidentally hit z so here i'm gonna select the trophy case and you're gonna notice right now one we only have the big noise so we need to mix the two noises together but two i think this is a little bit too warped for my taste for a wood texture so on our big grain i'm gonna take the distortion and i'm gonna tone that down a little bit so it's a little bit more vertical maybe something around point four i think looks pretty good now to mix these two textures together if you guessed that we're gonna use a mix rgb node you would be correct so i'm gonna hit shift a go to texture i'm gonna grab oh not texture sorry color i'm gonna grab a mix rgb node i'm gonna snap it down i'm gonna plug the large grain into slot one the small grain into slot two i'm gonna plug the mix into our base color here so immediately you'll notice we have some nice wood grain and if we zoom out we have some nice larger detail but when i was experimenting with this earlier and honestly making good materials really comes down to trial and error i was experimenting with this earlier i realized i liked a different blend mode better so if i go to my mix node and i hit the drop down we have a whole bunch of different blend modes and i'd encourage you to experiment with these and just become familiar with what each of them do but the one that i liked from my wood material was the overlay blend mode that's gonna bring in more of the darkness of our noise of our larger noise texture here and i'm also gonna turn the factor down maybe to like point three ish just to make the wood grain a little bit more subtle here so that being said this still doesn't really look like wood and that's because it's a black and white noise texture image and we really need to bring in all of these beautiful wood colors so to do that we're going to use something called a color ramp i'm going to hit shift a go to converter color ramp and i'm going to snap that between my overlay and my principled shader just like that and nothing happens but this is a really cool node that works pretty much just like a gradient map in photoshop if you're familiar with that so what i mean by that is all of the blacks of our texture are mapped to this side of the gradient and all of our whites and our texture are mapped to this side of the gradient so if we slide these around for instance we could increase the contrast or we can take these little slider heads and make them whatever colors we want so to get a really convincing wood color i've always found the best way to do that is to literally color pick from your reference because what better way to get a real believable color than to use a real object so i'm going to select the slider head select the color box select the eyedropper and here i'm just going to try to color drop some nice dark wood over here looks like i ended up on some of the brighter grain on our texture since this is really bright so i'm gonna do that again to select something a little bit darker notice how much darker that got and then for our light wood i'm gonna select the whites and i'm just gonna color pick something over here so it's already starting to look more like wood but right now it really looks more like plastic so i found in my experimentation that the real wood feel comes in well one after we start adding roughness and bump and stuff like that but also adding more color variation having just two colors isn't going to create a really believable wood material so to do this i'm just going to add more points to our gradient here i'm going to hit the plus button can slide this over here i can hit the eyedropper and i can just start picking all sorts of different colors so we have a whole bunch of variety in here and i personally decided that i want to make more of a dark cherry wood kind of feel and i couldn't find really good cherry wood cabinets on the royalty free stock photo website that i could use commercially in a youtube video but what i want to do for that is just take these colors make them a little bit darker make them a little bit more red to give them that nice cherry wood feel i'm gonna make this one a bit more red maybe even a little bit darker than the first one and here i'm to take this make this a little bit more red although it's actually pretty red already take this one make it a little bit more red make it a bit darker i really like that dark hardwood feel because it just feels so classy with like a nice silver trophy on it i'm gonna take this one maybe move the dark ones over some just to bring that darkness in then i'm gonna darken all of this down of course and really you could just tweak this and mess with it forever and ever and ever to find something that you really perfectly like but this is starting to look like something that i could accept as cherry wood so maybe with a little bit of suspension of disbelief anyway this is starting to look cool you can manipulate the colors and mess with that as much as you want to create something that you really like a little bit brighter here i'm such a perfectionist but i'm going to move on so the next step here is going to be to take our noise texture and give it some roughness because right now our trophy case feels like a really shiny fake laminate and we need to add some roughness variation to this to make it feel like real wood so to do that i'm going to take our noise mixture here and we're gonna add another color ramp so i'm gonna hit shift a converter color ramp i'm gonna snap that down snap our mixture into it and then rather than using this as our roughness we're gonna do the exact same thing we've done like a billion times up until now we're gonna use a color mix rgb node and we're gonna use some exact roughness values so i'm gonna go ahead and hit shift a and put value shift d to duplicate that plug this one into slot one this one into slot two and plug the gradient ramp into our factor so picture what's happening here we have our combined wood texture made up of two noises plugged into a color ramp and now the blacks and whites of this combined color ramp are going to determine what the rough portions of our surface are so everything that's black is going to be the first value everything that's white is going to be the second value so when we convert this to a bump map everything that's black is going to be the stuff that's more receded it's pushed into the surface the stuff that's white and the texture is going to be the stuff that's poking out for the bump map so i think we want the crevices to be a little bit rougher so for that i'm going to go ahead and change the first value to something like 0.35 hit enter and here i'm going to change the second value to something a little bit shinier maybe like a point i don't know maybe like a point one or point one five or one two five i don't know just mess around with it coming something you like you know what i'm gonna go for it i'm gonna turn that to point one and we can always change that later so here i'm going to plug our color ramp into the material output just to see what this is looking like now i want this to be higher contrast for our roughness map so we can really see that detail when we plug it into our principled material so i'm going to take this slider and just push these two ends closer together and that'll create a nice higher contrast roughness map and i might also want this to be a more gradual gradient so rather than using a linear blend type for the gradient i can click the drop-down and change that to a b-spline blend mode notice that's going to create a much smoother gradual transition in our gradient so you're going to really push this contrast and get some nice detail in there so anyway that's looking pretty cool so let's see what it looks like when we plug it into the roughness i'm going to plug my material back into the material output i'm going to plug my mix shader into the roughness and check that out we got that really nice wood detail that's catching the light and then some of the other wood grain and detail that's sort of a little bit rougher which i think looks really cool so the next step here is gonna be to make the bump map or bump so for that i'm gonna take my little overlay here i'm gonna move it back here so we have more room to work with i'm gonna hit shift a go to vector bump and i'm just gonna drop that onto my node graph here i'm going to take the output plug that into the height on the bump node notice zoom in here just so you can get a good view of it here i'm going to take my bump node move it right over here next to my shader node and what this is about to do when i plug the normal into the normal is this is going to act like a normal map and what that does is it tells each polygon in this model hey this pixel of the surface is pointing this direction this pixel of the surface is pointing this direction so put all of that together and you get something that behaves like it's bumpy even though it's not actually bumpy so when the light hits it it's hitting it from the angle that it thinks it is rather than the angle it actually is it's really really cool so anyway if i take this normal and plug it into the normal you're gonna immediately notice that this is about the bumpiest gnarliest rotten most rotten looking wood you've probably ever seen it's just absolutely disgusting doesn't even look like wood and that's because our strength is way too high and when i say way too high i mean like way too high we're gonna take this one value and turn it all the way down to like a point zero two five that low not even point one now when i hit enter you're gonna notice this looks a whole lot more like wood and it's starting to get a whole lot more convincing look at that now finally one other thing we might want to do is go to our camera view look at this and i'm starting to realize that this is a little bit too shiny and rather than messing with the roughness i'm just going to turn the highlight value down so for that i'm going to go to the specular and if you slide that all the way to the left you get no reflectivity if you slide it all the way to the right you get maximum reflectivity so i'm going to set this at about half the value it was maybe like 0.25 and i think that looks a little bit better a lot less shiny which is kind of nice so that being said we've sort of finished the vertical portion of our wood i'm pretty happy with it at least for now but you're gonna notice our shelves are still like a splotchy disco kind of pattern we need to make this a nice horizontal wood material so for that we're going to create a second material but rather than duplicating this entire node network or redoing any work we're going to we're going to create something called a node group and to do that i'm going to click and drag to select everything between the texture coordinate and the material output it's like a big old vertical node sandwich i guess i'm going to hit control g to group these nodes and you're going to notice the background turns green so if i hit tab i can go out of our new group and you're going to notice this entire wood material network is now its own node and the really cool thing about working this way is we can now take this node or node group and plug it into any material we want and if we make any changes to the group it's automatically going to change it across every single one of those materials how cool is that so anyway i'm going to take the node group hit n and let's organize this a little better first of all we probably want to name this to something that's recognizable because if we open this file like five years down the line we're not gonna know what's going on so i'm gonna go ahead and drop down the properties here and i'm gonna call this wood material group i think that's pretty descriptive you can honestly name it whatever you want though you could name it larry if you really wanted to then you're also going to notice that our inputs into the group aren't labeled but they're also criss-crossing and that's not super clean so we could just drag these opposite of each other but what we can do instead is hit tab to go into the node group select the group input go up to the node tab over here select the top vector input and hit this little down arrow i know that was a whole lot of steps but now you're going to notice that these are no longer tangled we also probably want to label these so again if we come back to this later and decide we want to use it we can just plug we we know what we're supposed to plug into these individual slots just saying vector isn't particularly descriptive so i'm going to double click the bottom one here and i'm going to call this small grain then i'm gonna double click the top one i'm gonna call this large grain finally i'm gonna hit tab to go out of the group and now we're gonna give a brand new material to our shelves so if i go over to our material editor i'm going to hit plus to create a new material slot i'm going to hit tab to go into edit mode and remember this entire trophy case is created with just a couple modifiers so we only have to modify half of one little cubby hole and it's going to spread those changes across our entire trophy case which is really cool so i'm going to hit alt a to deselect everything hover my mouse over the top shelf hit l to select it hover my mouse over the bottom shelf hit l to select that then i'm going to hit assign on our brand new material slot here i'm going to hit tab to go back to object mode and i'm going to go ahead and rename my wood texture just before i forget and that was a pretty convenient time to do it i'm going to call this wood vertical then i'm going to select our empty slot for our shelves i'm going to select the material drop down i'm going to choose wood vertical and we're going to make this a single user material so to do that i'm going to click the little 2 right here i'm going to name this wood or horizontal so we have our node group and we have our inputs to the node group and our wood horizontal so all we have to do is change out which empties we're using and then we'll have horizontal wood and we'll have vertical wood so for that i'm gonna select both of these empties right here both of our wood empties i'm gonna hit shift d i'm going to right click to drop them back down right where they were i'm going to hit r y 90 on my keyboard hit enter to set it in place and now all we have to do is go back to our trophy hit x on both of these eyedropper inputs you'll notice we're back to our tippy dippy trippy texture here but to fix that now all i have to do is choose these eyedroppers so for our small grain i'm going to choose the new small empty and for our large grain i'm going to choose the large empty and immediately you'll notice we have our nice horizontal wood texture and like i said we have two separate wood materials here but they're both being controlled by the same node group so if i come into this node group and let's say i want to change the color of this maybe from my camera perspective let's say we want to make it darker or something i could hit shift a color rgb curves and i could snap that down in between my color ramp and my principled and now this is just like a curves modifier in photoshop for instance so for this i could just drag it up to make it brighter or drag it down to make it nice darker and classier if i do say so myself and you're going to notice it's changing both our horizontal shelves and our vertical portions of the trophy case at the exact same time because both of these individual materials are using the same node group there's so much power involved with that so anyway i'm going to go ahead and hit tab to go out of the node group i'm going to hit alt h to unhide everything in the scene i'm going to go back over to my world panel set the strength maybe even darker than it was before maybe like 0.115 i think that's looking pretty cool and at this point i just want to make some final visual tweaks to our scene because we've done most of the grunt work we've done all of the hard parts so first of all i want some nice visual shadows on this trophy case because it's so dark our lights not really having much of an effect in terms of creating shadows so we just need to brighten up our light a little bit so i'm going to rotate out of my camera i'm going to select my key light hit 0 to go back to my camera and here i'm going to go to my light tab i'm going to change that to way brighter just so it has a bigger visual impact maybe something like 3250. hit enter and now you can see that we actually have like some nice color visible on our trophy case and we get some nice shadows in here and it just looks a whole lot nicer in my opinion but you can also experiment with whatever you want to make it as well another thing i want to do is make the reflections a little bit less bright now that they're on a almost solid black backdrop here the reflections are a little bit too prevalent so i'm going to select the glass go to my material over here i'm going to change that to 0.015 instead of 0.025 and i think that looks a lot nicer one other thing that's bothering me here is the text and again these are all just final tweaks that i decided i want to start making to the scene just to finish this up so i'm going to hit s to scale my text down because i think it's a little bit too big relative to the name plate then i'm going to hit g y yy let's move it on its own local y-axis all stuff we've done before click to set that down and finally i think it's way brighter than anything else in the scene so i'm just gonna turn the color of my text down a little bit as well just to make it a little bit dimmer hit alt a to deselect it and i think this is looking pretty cool oh one other thing we want to change i knew there was one other thing is you can see the reflection of our fill light just this really hard edged perfect square in the upper right hand corner of the frame so to fix that i'm literally just gonna move my fill light so i'm gonna select the fill light we made a couple videos ago hit g z and i'm gonna move it up outside of the camera view click to set it down and now i'm gonna hit the little oh before i move it to that one other way you can check the composition of your image for your camera image is you can select your camera you can go to your camera settings and if you go to viewport display where it says passive part out if you set that to one that's going to make everything outside of your camera solid black now i'm going to hit this little chain link icon to hide all of the outlines and stuff that doesn't render and we can take a really good look at our trophy before we move on to the last two parts here i think this is looking really cool pat yourself on the back you've made it through all of the hard parts now let's just move on and finish up this tutorial series i'll see you in the next video at this point you should have a decent looking wood material for your trophy case and hopefully a pretty decent understanding of material nodes and object-based coordinates and blender that's a mouthful if you found this video useful and want to stay tuned for day 9 make sure you hit that like and subscribe button and ring the bell i'll be releasing these basics videos on a daily basis for the duration of the course and if you want to come hang out with me live i'm live at least every friday at youtube.com oraclefish also if you want to download my example files or just support what i do here on the channel make sure you check out my brand new patreon link in the description until next time my name is chris folia i'm your stream scholar and class is out you

Channel: Stream Scholar

Views: 338

Keywords: streamschool, stream scholar, streamscholar, blender, blender 2.9, blender tutorial, blender beginner tutorial, blender for beginners, blender material nodes, how to use blender material nodes, material nodes, procedural wood, procedural wood blender, blender procedural wood material, material nodes tutorial blender

Id: MpU0uzUzhHE

Length: 26min 58sec (1618 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 27 2021