Introduction to Anisotropic Shading in Blender

g'day this is Andrew price here from blender Google calm and in this video tutorial I'm going to be giving you an introduction to a cool new feature of blender called anisotropic shading so this is a new shading type which was added to blender in the latest release which is 2.65 and this new shader will allow us to create this image that you can see right here so you can see on the bottom of this saucepan you've got the light which is sort of bending and reflecting in a strange sort of radial type pattern so that's exactly what this shader is for it is for mimicking the look of metal which has been sanded I guess in a particular direction and that's really what this this shader is all about so in this very quick video tutorial I'm going to be showing you what anisotropic shading is when to use it and then how to use it so I'm going to be where basically we're going to start by modeling a saucepan and then we're going to be applying this exact material that you can see right here so this is very quick very easy and I'm sure this will be a very yeah super fast tutorial so first things first let's talk about what anisotropy is according to Wikipedia anisotropy is the property of being directionally dependent as opposed to isotropy which implies identical properties in all directions now that sounds very complex but essentially it is similar to how a glossy shader will work so we can use that as a starting example so the normal glossy shader I'm sure you're all familiar with it in cycles you just click on glossy shader the way that behaves is the light comes down and it reflects off it and that reflection is the same in all directions so it doesn't matter if you viewed the you know you viewed it from the left angle the right angle or anything like that it will be it'll be the same in all directions now anisotropic shading on the other hand the light will come down and it will reflect in a defined grain so basically the path that you will define as the user when you create the shader which will be where the light will be stretched along okay so let's just I'll go into blender now and I'll just you an example of that so here you can see I've got a scene of a white ball sitting on this reflective surface so this is just the basic glossy shader that I'm using right here and you can see whoops I go in properly there we go you can see that as I rotate around the reflection is essentially the same in every direction now if I was to change this and use the anisotropy shader on the other hand you can see that I now have a grain so this is a linear type so the grain of it is now going from left to right and you can see that from this angle you get a very different reflection than you would from this angle so it creates a very interesting material which is frequently seen in the real world in essentially any metal surface which has been sand so that's brushed metal vinyl all sorts of different things like that so you can now go ahead and create that using blender so it's very exciting and it has a lot of really cool purposes so let's have a look this is a real photo this is some brushed metal I'm sure you've all seen that before but you can see looking in this example the grain of the shader is going from left to right now the grain is defined in the real world by tiny little not almost microscopic but you can see little tiny bumps in the surface and that is basically telling where the light will go which path that will travel along so that is that that's essentially what anisotropic shading is mimicking so it's allowing you to do that without having to set up a bump map and do it all yourself because if you used a bump map with like let's say like a cloud texture which has been stretched you would get a lot of noise in there and it wouldn't look quite right so this anisotropic shader will do it all for you and it will look cool and it will render fast this is another example here this is a radial type anisotropic shader so you could see that with those that would have been created using like a circular sander those little grooves and stuff but you can see that it creates it the light sort of bends around the surface of it and this is of course what we're going to be using in our final example on the saucepan and then a final example here this is of another sheet of sanded metal you can see in this way it light is going in that direction as well okay cool so those are a few real world examples there's yeah brushed metal vinyl that was pretty common base of a fry pan velvet technically but then there's a velvet shader as well so be cautious about using it on fabric I haven't really found much use for it myself and then you've got CDs and all sorts of stuff like that so it does have a lot of uses but basically only use it when the surface that you're trying to create has a grain so if it's been sanded essentially like with if you could just imagine like a piece of sandpaper the paper that's gone across it if that's what you're trying to create then that's when you use it if it's not like that if it's just a smooth surface then just stick to the glossy shader anyway those are a few things this is the example I showed you at the start and that's what I'm going to show you how to create right now so go ahead open up blender to do that right now and although modeling the saucepan isn't really a part of this tutorial basing off the feedback that I've received in the past from you guys I know you don't like using a starter file so we're gonna actually go ahead and model the saucepan it's going to be really easy like one minute so let's go ahead and do that so we're going to start with a cylinder and we'll set this the amount of vertices to just 16 as I've got right there and I'm going to scale this down on these z axes just like that so about the height of a saucepan I guess yeah about that that's pretty good and I'm going to delete this top face and I want that to be like a lip it's down like towards the bottom to about there and so this lip is just going to sort of be like indented like a little bit like that you know like the base of saucepans I don't know how much time you guys have spent in the kitchen I did a hospitality course when I was in high school learnt some very well helpful things but I've forgotten most of it so it wasn't really good but anyway so now I've got this I've got a little lip that I've just created around the top there as well and I'm going to hit control two and that's going to add a subsurf modifier now I want to smooth out this bottom here or not smooth it but get more I don't know what you call it crisper title I don't know you know just to create a nice sharp edge there I guess and then towards the top another loop there as well okay and also I'm just going to select these two one at a time well well well well everything's going on I'll select these edge loops here and I'm just going to turn on the mean crease for those those two just like that and there we go so that is the saucepan essentially the IT I'll just create one just a little small lip just around the base of it like that and that's just so that that radial pattern isn't too distorted because if you don't have enough vertices there it can kind of get weird so just creating a little extrusion just inwards a little bit as you can see right there okay cool awesome now you've got that now before we have to get into the shader it helps to be able to see what what the settings and stuff that you're actually adding to it and in order to do that you need to set up lighting now you could go ahead and add in a whole bunch of lights and stuff like that but the shader works best when you've got a lot of different reflections happening so the easiest way to do that is to go ahead and just use an environment map so if you're looking at the world settings if you click on color and then select environment texture what you can do is go ahead and load in an HDR image so there's a bunch of these online this is one of the free ones I'm using kitchen probe which is very appropriate for hours I think and I'll just turn down the strength of that to be 0.5 because it comes a little bit a little bit too amped just straight out of the box so something like that so let's have a look at this just in rendered View mode so we can see yeah you've got really nothing there it's just a diffuse shader currently so I'll go ahead and I'll just save this right now mr. tester and I'll also click on GPU as well so we've got it not nice and faster okay cool so we can go ahead and add a new material now and then from the surface type if you're using the latest version 2.65 you will see you have anisotropic B SDF so go ahead and click on that and now down here this is the - here by the way node editor down here you can see you've got this new little shader so I'll just explain explain briefly what these settings do so the roughness value is the basically the blurriness of the reflections so that actually needs to be higher than zero if it's zero you'll just see crisp glossy reflections as you can see we have right here oh by the way if you see this happen with the saucepan like these little pans along the bottom they're just scale it up I'm not sure why that happens but just needs to be a little bit more scaled up than it is currently anyway so that that gloss glossiness needs to be higher than zero so let's just turn that up to be point one now the anisotropy value that is the amount of actual stretching this of the of the light so if you had this at zero let's just set that to zero you would essentially have a glossy shader just a basic out of the box glossy shader so by turning that up I normally set it to around about 0.9 you will get something which looks a lot more like oh one more thing without environment texture in the background you want to make sure that you change it from equirectangular to Mirrorball for that HDR because as i zoomed up then i could see a big black hole which was a telltale sign that I used the wrong mapping anyway getting complicated let's stay on track so setting them up to be about 0.9 you get the correct stretching of the of the light you can set up to one but anyway I got rotation now that is used sparingly I think but that's just for a manual rotation of that light bending so I haven't really used that the normal map that allows you to add in bump mapping so if you wanted to go ahead and do that you can for this one there is no bumps we won't to be doing that and then you've got tangent now that is the most important one and that will define how the light actually bends around so what you plug into this tangent value you can use an image texture if you want but it gets a little bit complicated there that's sort of a complex sort of thing but normally what you'll be using is a tangent node and you plug that in like that now by default you actually don't need that and by default it will use radio so if you just have that nothing there it will use radio so you can see under here at the base of ours you can't really see actually because it's kind of a it's not really picking up much light from down there so what I'm going to do I'm going to hit alt D olds D by the way we'll create a copy of it but it will keep all the settings the same so if I change something over here then the example stays the same over there anyway so alt D and then if I just rotate this just so that I've got it one end up like that and going to render View mode there you go you can see now you have that radial and so tropics aiding and that's it end of tutorial guys huh pretty much I mean it as I said it's really really SuperDuper easy to get it to work now there is actually something wrong with this shader at the moment because although it looks great from the base actually around the side of it it's actually going to be using the radial type as well but the way it's set up currently is that if you if it was to be UV unwrapped you would have somewhere in here which would be it would sort of be bulging inwards towards as in the light would be wrapping it because this like there's a center there's a center where all the light is sort of going towards and although you can't really see much of it along here there should be a point in there where it's kind of like warping a little bit at least if that's if it's done by UV anyway so what we should do is we should have a radial type along the base there and then you should have a linear anisotropic shading around the rest of it so let's go ahead and set that up now this linear type that I'm going to show you how to do right now is how you will also create brushed metal like if you just wanted a brushed metal surface this is how you would do that as well so it's very helpful to learn so this top one here I'll just call this one radial I'm going to create a new material I'm going to copy the same settings but I'm going to click that little value there so we've got the same settings I'll just call this one linear now what we do with this one is we use a tangent shader as well we plug this in but what we want to do is to set the direction to be not radial but UV map and what this will do is it will actually allow us to define where err which direction the light should be bending as opposed to just being by default on radial so that's why we need to UV unwrap it so UV unwrapping it will actually allow us to long yeah to define that so let's go to the UV image editor and I'll just click on this one here by having these as copies by the way like like the copying the same values as each other I'll be able to UV unwrap one and have the exact same settings apply to the other one so that's just just letting you know that okay so easiest way to UV unwrap this cylinder is just from front view mode if I just go you and then select cylinder projection I now have it UV unwrapped perfect and you can see that along here you've got this kind of like row that's kind of going on to the side that's actually the base like this area right along the base there so an easy way to UV unwrap just that area is from front from top view mode if i just hit project from view bounds now I have a perfectly UV unwrapped base as well as the rest of it so I've now got them overlapping but that's fine and what I want to do is I want this material linear to apply to just our base materials let's just select those and I'll click on assign let's just check that works click select there you go that's collected there and then I've got the rest of it which is now using radial perfect okay cool so now that I've got that looking at our linear material here I guess I can click oh one other thing I guess I should have said the way because this is uh what this will do this tangent node using the UV map if I just go ahead and select that it will use this UV map to define the direction of that anisotropic shader but the way the direction goes is it goes vertically so from up down like that so if you wanted that reflection to be stretched around like horizontally around the saucepan then what you should do is select that like that and then rotate it by 90 degrees and then you will change the direction of that anisotropic shader so that's just a little tip there for you but we want it just to behave exactly as it is right now so now if we have a look at it we probably won't see much change but at least it is technically correct right now and actually the base of our material here is just kind of just kind of gone off and don't turn things let's add a tangent shader drop that into the tangent point actually did I do it the wrong way I think I did didn't I select ah yeah I did okay okay so I assigned the wrong material like the exact wrong way around so let's just fix that shall we okay Linnea is supposed to be around the walls of it and then radial should be the base I'm sure a lot of you watching that at home was screaming out at me no don't do it you've got it round the wrong way well you're right but unfortunately I can't hear you from that monitor but that's it guys that's it that I it is now done and dusted so that's a very brief very quick introduction to a cool new shader using cycles so I'm really happy that this is finally here because we can now do this fancy stuff which you previously couldn't and I see there is one more thing I might show you so if you zoom in on here you can see that you would have a very clean very nice-looking you know warped radial shader thing but if you technically if you wanted to look really realistic like in in my example you can see right here you can see that if you zoom in on that you would actually be able to see the grain in which that's actually going around now the way I did that is I actually used a texture which I created myself so I just go ahead and add in an image texture so I created a texture using Photoshop I just added in a noise and then I use the radial blur in Photoshop and I just created my very own brushed metal radial texture this one right here and then if I plug this into that color input right there you can see that you can now actually see the grain and if the grain is a little bit too heavy like it's too black as it is currently I can then just add in a color ramp node and then I'll just turn down this black value make it more of a grayish color something like um then that then you would have it that's it and then if you really wanted to you could also let's just add in where is it vector vector converter math we could actually make this apply to the bump mapping just kind of cheating because it's really what the anisotropic shaders should be doing but I just give that a really really super low value like point zero zero one that will actually alter the render times it will kind of like amp it up a little bit but you get just a tiny in C little bit of grain in there which just kind of helps to sell the realism just a little bit more but that's it guys I hope you enjoyed this tutorial hope that you learnt something it's very quick and it's designed I designed this tutorial to be like that so you guys can venture off and create some cool materials if you create something cool by all means link it in the comments below and that is all from me I will see you next time

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 251,240

Keywords: blender, cycles, tutorial, anistropy

Id: t4MTnpnahu0

Length: 18min 33sec (1113 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 20 2012