Introduction to Procedural Shader Nodes for Complete Beginners (Blender Tutorial)

in this blender beginner tutorial I will show you the basics of how to use blender's procedural Shader nodes so this tutorial is geared for beginners so I'm going to show you the very very basics of procedural nodes and blender and we're going to be creating a very simple procedural material with blender Shader nodes so this video is great for beginners who know the very basics of blender like maybe you know a little bit of modeling and a few shortcut keys but if you haven't ever used the Shader node before and you want to get into the Shader nodes and just kind of learn the basics and learn how to create your own basic procedural materials then that's what this video is geared for now speaking of procedural materials I did want to let you know about my ultimate blender proced draw material pack so my ultimate material pack comes with all of my proced draal materials and they're all preset up for blender's asset browser with custom thumbnails sorted catalogs and customizable node groups so if you're interested in purchasing the proced dral material pack I'll have the links in the description and purchasing is a really great way to help support this channel Channel and you can also check out my procedural material packs if you'd like to just purchase packs of 10 materials and you can also find all of my materials individually on my gumroad store and after this procedural nodes beginner tutorial if you'd like to learn how to create more procedural materials then you can check out my blender procedural material tutorial playlist where I show you how to create all of my procedural materials so to use blender Shader nodes we need to go to the Shader editor so there are these workspaces right up here and if you click on the shading one that will take you to blender's shading workspace and so your layout might look slightly different than mine but you should have a 3D viewport somewhere on the screen and then also a Shader editor now another way to do this if you're just back here on the layout if you want to open the Shader editor is you can click here in the corner when the Crosshair appears you can click and hold down your mouse and you can drag out and this is going to split the window so we now have two 3D view ports now to make this be the shade editor instead you can click here to change the editor type and then you can change it to the Shader editor I am however just going to click here to go to the shading workspace and then what I'll do is hold down the Z button and I'll move my mouse up and let go to go into the rendered view just because I want to be able to see this in the rendered mode and you can see I also set up some very basic lighting so we have some nice lighting to preview the materials so this object doesn't have any material right now and so there's kind of a base material that is given to all object objects and it's just this white material but it doesn't actually have a material so we need to add one so if you select the object there's two ways to add a new material you can click over here to the materials panel and then you can click new here or if you're in the Shader editor you can also click on new here to add a new material now you can see over here on the Shader editor this is kind of a simplified version of the procedural nodes but we're not going to be using this because we're instead going to use the Shader editor and this is much more advanced you can only do so much with the side panel and it's kind of hard to use it's much easier just to use the procedural nodes so I'm just going to make this smaller to kind of get this out of the way so we have a bit more space now you can rename the material if you want to so right here I'm just going to call it like metal because later on in the video we will be creating a very simple procedural metal material so on default when you add a new material there are going to be these two different nodes so each one of these boxes in the Shader editor is called a node now if you click and drag you can move the nodes around and then also of course you can use your scroll wheel to scroll in and out and you can click down with your scroll wheel or your middle Mouse button and you can move around the view so you can see that there are these little dots here on this side of the node and this side of the node and then there are these wires which are plugged up to the nodes and the wires are how the nodes communicate so this here is the principal Shader and this is the default Shader in blender so this is added to a material on default and so this is basically a base material and so there's going to be many different values that you can change so there's the base color so if I click on this I could for instance make it like a blue color and you can see now the sphere is blue there's also this metallic value so right now the material is not metal but if I wanted to make it metal I could turn the metallic value up so I can click and drag it up and now you can see it looks like a shiny metal sphere I'll just turn this down now there's also this roughness value so the roughness is how shiny it is so if you want to make it look like a very shiny reflective plastic I could turn the roughness down and you can see now it is very shiny and it's reflecting the hdri lighting that I've added into the scene or I can turn the roughness up and now it's going to look kind of chalky and there's not quite as many Reflections I will turn it back to the default which is 0.5 so you can click and drag to move around the values or you can click on it and then you can type in any value so I'll type in 0.5 now there are many other values the base color metallic and roughness those are some common ones that you'll use there are many other values here so if you click on these arrows to open them up there's many different values I am not going to be going over all of these though because I want to keep this tutorial very simple for beginners so these things you can learn about them later uh but we're not going to be going over them in this video so that is the principal Shader it is the base material and then this over here this is the material output so any nodes which you create they need to eventually be plugged into the material output if you want to see the material on the object if I click right here on the yellow Dot and then drag out you can see that I'm actually unplugging the wire and then if I let go you can see now our base principal Shader is not plugged up to the material output so you can see now our sphere is fully black because it doesn't have any Shader however if I click right here on this little Green Dot I can pull out a wire and then I can stick it up here to the surface and the volume and the displacement we're not really going to go over that in this video because again I want to keep this video very simple for beginners so these are a little bit more complex materials which you can watch tutorials on and if you watch my blender procedural material tutorial playlist I do make materials which use the volume and the displacement but for now we're just going to use the surface so this principled Shader we want it to be applied to the surface of the sphere so we're going to stick it up to the surface so now that the wire is connecting this data is going into the material output and so that now can show up on the object so in the Shader editor you can add different nodes and you can plug all of the nodes up together and that's going to give it data to tell it what the material is going to look like so for example I have this base color here and I could change the color so I could make it a blue color or a red color let's actually go with like a green color however I might want to plug a texture up instead so instead of using a single color maybe I want to have a texture over this sphere so what you can do to add new nodes is you can click here on the add menu and there's going to be many different nodes nodes the other way to do this is by pressing shift a so shift a or the ad menu let's press shift a and then there are different categories for different nodes so for instance there are different color nodes there are different texture nodes and again I don't want to overwhelm you with too much stuff because there's a lot of nodes but a lot of these nodes you don't really need to know about when you're first learning procedural materials so I'll press shift a and I'm just going to add a very basic common texture and it's going to be the procedural noise texture so to get to it you can go down here to texture and then you can choose noise texture or when you press shift a you can just immediately start to type so you don't actually have to click on the search here you can if you want to but you can also press shift a and then you can just start to type and you can type in noise and here's the noise texture so let's click on it and now you can see it's following our Mouse and let's drop it here now when you are plugging up Shader nodes the Shader nodes read from left to right so for example we first have the noise texture and we want to put the noise texture onto the Shader and then the Shader actually interacts with like the lighting and the 3D scene and then that Shader goes into the material output which then it can show up on the object so again you start from left and you go to right so it's kind of like reading left to right so we now have this noise texture but you can't actually see the noise texture what I'm going to do is drag the material output up here and then we can actually just take this noise texture and we can take the factor which is just black and white white data and we can pull out a wire just like we did earlier and we can actually stick it right here into the surface so now you can see that it isn't interacting with any light it isn't actually showing you any light in the scene and that's because we aren't using our Shader anymore we are just using a pure texture however you can now see the actual texture and if you're wondering what the color is we can actually replace this so if you click and drag out a color you can stick it here under the surface and you can see it's pretty much the same thing it is the same noise texture but it has random colors instead but for this example I just want to use the black and white so let's click here to pull out a wire and we can stick it into the surface that we can see it all right so back to the actual noise texture so we now have the noise texture plugged into the surface so that we can see it so now we can change different settings so just like the principled Shader here it has different settings that you can change there are different settings here which will change how the noise texture looks so for example there is this scale so you can make it really big or really small there's also this really cool detail level so you can turn this all the way up and if you push it all the way up it'll stop at 15 and now if you zoom into the texture you can actually see it has a bit more detail then there's this cool roughness value here and this is pretty much going to add more detail I don't really know why they call it roughness because it's kind of like a second layer of detail you can see if I turn this way up you can see there's much more detail there or I can turn this down and you can see the noise is going to look much more Blobby so I might turn the roughness up a little bit maybe like a 7 so so it has more detail then there is this lacity value so I can turn this up and if I turn this one up you can see there's going to be these little clumps of dots and then finally there is this Distortion here and this is going to kind of distort it and it's just going to change the shape of it you can see it looks all wobbly now so the Lac andity I will turn back to two because that is the default and the Distortion I will turn that back to zero so this isn't really a great material for realism because we are don't actually have any shading data so there's no lights or anything interacting with the object so what we can do is we can take the factor and we can instead put it into the base color so I'll put the factor and put it into the base color and then we want the bsdf which is the output here of the Shader and we can instead replace that so we'll stick it into the surface so now you can see that the actual lighting data is interacting with the object so it's kind of light over here there's kind of a blue color over here but you can see that it is now replaced that green color so we are basically replacing the green color color for that texture instead now you may also be wondering what the difference is between a regular texture and a procedural texture so if you press shift a you can go to the search and you can search for an image texture and this is just an image texture node and so then what you can do is you can click on open and you could add an external file into blender so for instance if you have a JPEG file or a PNG file and you wanted to add that image onto your Shader then you could do that by opening it up here and then just select the image so this is not a procedural texture because this is where you would add an image texture into blender however this here this is a procedural texture and so basically what procedural means is that it has been generated procedurally within blender so an image texture here is something that you would need to have on your computer so maybe you've downloaded a wood texture from a texture website online and so once you've downloaded that you would open it up and so that would be an external texture on your computer which blender is using but the noise texture is procedural and so it is being procedurally generated just within blender so you don't actually need a PNG or jpig file which looks like noise it's just being procedurally generated within blender and so that is what a procedural material or a procedural texture is and what's really cool about procedural textures is you can adjust them just like we've done before so you can change the roughness and the detail and the scale and you couldn't do that with a normal texture like let's just say you downloaded a JPEG file of like a wood texture and then you opened it up you couldn't really adjust any of the values because it is using actual pixels it's a JPEG file or a PNG file so you couldn't actually adjust the texture however with this noise texture you have many different adjustable settings because it has been created procedurally within blender now you can see just like the principal Shader has different sockets here which you can plug information up to it the noise texture also has different sockets here so you can plug information up to it a really simple example to show you how to use this is let's say we want to change the scale and detail values at the same time so before I do that I should make these values the same so I'm going to turn the scale to 15 and the detail to 15 so let's say when I change the scale I also want the detail to get less well to do that I could press shift a and that'll bring up the ad menu and then I can start to type in value and we're going to add the value node let's drop it here so this value node is very simple it is literally just a value so you can turn this value to whatever you want and then if you plug it into different sockets it is going to use that value so let's take the value and we can plug it up to the scale and then we can also take the value and we can also plug it up to the detail so now again this value here is going to override the scale so if I unplug this you can see now the scale is set to 15 but if I plug the value up to the socket here it is going to override this scale and it will instead use this scale instead because we are giving it that data so now I could drag this up and you can see as I turn it up it is getting more detailed but it's also getting smaller and then as I drag this down it is getting bigger and the detail is getting less so that is pretty cool so that's just a very simple way that you can plug data or information into another node and then of course this noise data is going into the principled Shader now let's say that you want to edit the colors or the contrast of the noise texture before it goes to the principal Shader well in between the noise texture and the principal Shader we could add more nodes in here to actually edit what the noise texture looks like so for example I could press shift a let's go here to the search and a very common node is the color ramp node so you can search for color ramp let's click on the color ramp node and then to add it right in here instead of like dropping it here and then like dragging the factor up to it and then plugging the color up to it what you can do right after you add the color amp is you can hover it over the wire and you can see the wire turns that light color and then you can let go and that is going to automatically plug it into our node setup so now because the color amp is after the noise texture it is going to affect the noise texture and then that will affect the base color so the color ramp is a really cool node it's one of my favorite nodes you can see on default there is this little black Tab and this little white Tab and what you can do is click on these tabs and you can drag them around and if there is more black areas you can see it's going to make the texture more black or if there is more of the white area it's going to make the texture are more white and if you drag them closer and closer together there's going to be lots more contrast now if you click on the tab you can click down here on this little color value and it'll give you a color palette and you can just change it to whatever color you want so you could make this like a blue color and this one here you could maybe make this like a light blue maybe even like a green and so you can just change those colors so now the noise texture has a different color and that is going into the base color all right so hopefully this has giv you a good understanding of the very basic of procedural Shader nodes but I remember when I was first learning blender I really enjoyed learning if I was actually creating something while I was learning so we're now going to be creating a very basic metal material so what I'm going to do is actually just start fresh so I'll click on here to get rid of this material and then let's click on new to add a new material so again it's going to give us a principled Shader and the material output so to make the material look like metal we have this cool metallic value so I can drag the metallic value up and you can see now it looks a bit more like metal and then for the base color here metal usually is a little bit darker so if I click on this color I can maybe make it a little bit darker so now it's kind of like a gray color and then I do want to make this metal look a bit more shiny so this roughness here we can drag it down and you can see now it is more reflective so it's reflecting the light and other objects which are in the scene so already we have a pretty basic metal material but I want to make it look a bit more interesting by adding some more textures up to it so we're going to be adding that noise texture that I showed you earlier in the video so if I press shift a for the add menu I can start to search for noise and let's add the noise texture and then we can take this factor and we can put that here into the base color so now the noise texture is controlling the actual colors of the Shader now I might want to control this better cuz maybe I want some parts to be darker so let's add that color amp to adjust the colors so if I press shift a let's go to to the search here and I can search for the color ramp node it's one of my favorite nodes let's add the color ramp and we want to put the color ramp in between the noise and the principled and why we're doing that is because first we need the noise texture data then we're going to edit the noise texture data with the color amp and finally that will go into the principled Shader so now what I can do is change these colors so let's say maybe I want to make the metal darker I can click here on this white color right here and I can click on this color and I can make it a little bit darker so now it is more of a gray color so now that looks kind of cool and if I want to make it more contrasty I could also drag these tabs together and so if I drag them together you'll be able to see more contrast and then another cool thing you could do to make it look more interesting is to change some of the noise texture settings so let's make it really detailed so I'll turn the detail all the way to the max of 15 and now that definitely looks more interesting and also this roughness here we could maybe turn it up to like a 6 and that looks even cooler so that is a really cool metal now it kind of looks like a dirty metal and also if you want to make it look a little bit more dirty maybe add some dirt you could just click here on this black color and you could click on this color and maybe you could make it a little bit brighter and then you can make it kind of an orangey color and if you make it orange and then make it darker that is going to make it brown so basically to make brown you make orange and then you just make it really dark so now it kind of looks like a dirty worn metal now another really cool thing we could do is we could plug data into the roughness and if we plug some information up to the roughness value then that's going to tell the material what parts are going to be really shiny and what parts are going to be really rough so right now we just have a single roughness value so the metal has the same amount of roughness all over the material however in the real world there is slight variation so some little parts of the metal might be a little bit more scratched or a little bit more rough and other parts be might be a little bit more smooth and a little bit more shiny so what we can do is we can actually just take this Factor value and we can plug it into the roughness so now what you can see is happening is some parts like right over here that looks a bit more shiny but then other parts like right over here that looks really rough so it almost looks like right here it's kind of been rubbed with some sand paper so it's really rough but then right over here this has been nice and smoothed so that gives the metal more variation so it looks more realistic now I do want to make all of the metal look a bit darker so an easy way to do this is to just add some data in between between the noise and the principled and we can make it a bit more shiny so what I'm going to do to change the colors is I will press shift a and let's go to the search and I'm going to search for the Hue saturation value node so let's click on the Hue saturation value and I'm going to put it in between the noise and the roughness because I need the noise data and then I'm going to make it darker and then it will go into the Shader so let's drop the Hue saturation value right here now to see what it is doing let's take the color here and I can stick it up to the roughness so here is the noise texture and it doesn't really look any different but we now have the Hue and the saturation and the value now the Hue and the saturation we're not going to use because those are just controlling colors but we are going to use the value so the value is going to make it lighter or darker so if the value is really high it's super bright or if the value is really far down it is dark now if I plug the principal Shader back up to the surface you can see that by changing the value that is going to make the material more light or more dark now you might be wondering how colors can affect numbers because if I unplug this wire right here you can see that originally this roughness has a number so if the roughness is turned to zero it is going to be super shiny and it looks like a mirror but if the roughness is turned to one it is going to be super rough now how the color can affect the number is if the color is fully black that is equal to zero and if the color is fully white that is equal to one so let's take the color again and can put that into the roughness so if I turn this value way up that is going to make it lighter and so again if it's fully white that's going to equal one but then if the value is turned all the way down to zero it is now fully black and so fully black is going to equal zero so that is how you can use the colors to actually affect the numbers which will control the roughness so maybe this value here I'll just turn it down a little bit to make it look a bit more shiny and then one more thing that I might want to do is go over here to the noise texture and maybe turn the scale up to like a 10 so you can see it better but now you can see that we've created this really cool metal material and so I'm going to end the tutorial here so if this is the first time you've used blender Shader nodes then congratulations you've created your first procedural material now this is just a very simple material and there's so many more things you can do with blender procedural Shader nodes so if you'd like to learn more then I highly recommend checking out my blender procedural material tutorial playlist and so in that playlist I have literally over 100 proced material tutorials and I'm always creating more and adding more to the playlist and so in the playlist I have tons of different procedural material tutorials like food tutorials so I have like a procedural cheese material I have a procedural banana material a procedural Apple material I also have some different procedural candy materials I also have some rock materials some dirt materials some sand materials I have some like other metal materials and some sci-fi materials I also have some Planet surface materials like an earth material and a Mars material and and some other alien planets and so many more procedural materials and so I highly recommend checking out that tutorial playlist if you'd like to learn more about procedural materials so that's going to wrap it up for this tutorial thank you for watching and I hope you found this helpful and if you'd like to help support me and this channel then a great way to do that is by checking out my gumroad store and my patreon page where I have 3D models and assets tutorial files artwork project files procedural materials and much more blender content on my gumroad store and my patreon page but I hope you found this helpful and thank you for watching

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 12,760

Keywords: Ryan King Art, Blender Tutorial, Blender, Ryan King, Tutorial, shader, nodes, procedural, shader nodes, procedural nodes, procedural material, 3d, blender material, shaders, beginner tutorial, procedural nodes for beginners, procedural material for beginners

Id: J5t7gzIfTt0

Length: 23min 34sec (1414 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 23 2023