Is this the BEST Material Add-On for Blender?

what's up guys Justin here with the CG essentials.com so in today's video we're going to check out an add-on that I really like for adding materials to my models let's go ahead and just jump into it all right so depending on when you watch this um you may still be able to get material Li on sale I think that's through the end of the day tomorrow if you can't or don't see this by then it's still a great value even if it's not on sale no I will link to all add-ons that I talk about in this video and the notes down below those are affiliate links meaning I do receive a commission if you do end up purchasing through those links and so really when you're looking at Material add-ons at least in my opinion you've really kind of got two options so the first is and this is not what material is the first is procedural materials right so procedural materials are basically materials that are set up that use nodes and blender in order to generate materials so they're really cool because they're adjustable um meaning you can come in here and you can make different changes and other things like that right so they're set up where uh where is it um down below there should be here it is so you you've got the ability to make some adjustments in here adding things like cracks and other things like that the thing with the procedural materials those are very heavy and they really can kind of like slow down your computer they're definitely great um I love Sanctus Library um because of the amount of stuff that's in here there's other procedural material libraries out there as well but the problem with them is they are a little bit heavy on your computer especially if you don't have a very fast machine so the other kind of material add-ons are going to be add-ons that are more PBR based meaning they're going to use more U material maps in order to generate effects you can still adjust them but not in the same way as the procedural materials which I actually think is a good thing because it means they have better performance and so in this case material liic is one of those add-ons I use this add-on a lot for adding materials in my model it has not only a great material Library um and what I like about it is it has mult multiple different kinds of materials right it's not just like one thing it's a bunch of different things contained in a collection but it's also got tools for setting up things like displacement which we'll take a look at in a minute so anyway material is a tool for adding materials inside your model and um there's a few different options that you can get with this tool right you can get the starter pack which is going to be super cheap um and it's going to have a few materials in here and some hdri images as well as the tools and then you've got other options to get like the full Library up to 8K resolution depending on the resolution of the materials that you need so if you don't need super high resolution materials you can get the less expensive version right here so one of the things that's happened with the polyonics is they've basically transitioned over to these add-ons right botanic material like traffic um these are all now asset collections that you can bring into blender and then you use a tool called ingon which is a free add-on that they have um in order to control your different materials right it's got its own asset browser it's got some other things in here as well but basically what that means is that means that you're going to need to download the asset pack files as well as the ingon browser and install that in blender but let's jump over and take a look at some of the tools that are contained inside of this and so we're going to use this Italian flap model from Flavio DEA tomasa that you can download from the blender demo files page in order to kind of take a look at the way that this works so if we jump over into blender what you're going to want to do is first off you're going to want to make sure that you install ingon so ingon is available for free through the blender market and then you want to make sure that you install and enable that so I'm going to look for ingon right here and then within ingon this is going to give you the ability to install the asset packs so this is basically going to take the material asset pack file and it's going to install it inside of blender and then once you do that what that's going to do is that's it's also going to set it up um with your asset packs so that you can access them from within the asset browser so first install ingon then go through and install the asset packs for material once you do that what's going to happen is those materials are all going to show up in your blender asset browser down below so you can go to the asset browser then you want to select the option for material full right here or whatever version you have in order to bring those in now one thing to note is ingon does have its own asset browser so and I'm going to drag a new window in here real quick um but you can click on this and then you can set a window to show the asset browser you can click in here and you can also filter and look at all of these materials using their asset browser so the plus to this is within their asset browser you basically have the ability to do more filtering and other things like that um but in general I find myself using the blender asset browser so we're going to close out of this we're going to close close this window and go back into this view so what I like about the material look materials is they're very simple right so let's say we want to add a wood floor to our floor so notice how if I click over into the wood section right here there's a number of different Woods I can just click and drag this into my scene like this right super easy don't have to do a whole lot of work anything like that and that material is going to be all set up and so say I was to look at the nodes for this tool right so we're going to go into the Shader editor right here and I want the node that's in here notice how this is all set up already um with all the different mapping the other things like that and this is actually a pretty complex setup well the cool thing is within ingon if you scroll down into the material X setting notice how there's actually options in here to adjust things about that material so like for example I can adjust the mapping of that material and the size just by using this slider right here so there's a slider in here to adjust the size there's also a slider in here to adjust things like the rotation of the object right so I can rotate this like 90° um do whatever I want there you can also set if this is mapped using the UV mapping the world mapping um or the object mapping um and so this makes working with materials really easy so let's say for example on this wall I wanted to Brick material so I'm going to jump back into my asset browser well there's a number of different wall surfaces as well as brick and stone materials so say that I wanted to bring in like a plaster I could click and drag that onto this wall right here it's going to take a second to compile that Shader but then that material is going to show up in here and again I can adjust things like the scale whoops I want to make sure that I actually have that object selected but I can adjust things like the scale of that texture really easily but then say that we wanted to add something like a brick over here well I can click and drag a brick material and these are all contained inside of this asset Library so they're really fast to bring in here right so I can bring these in I can make adjustments to them um using this tool and so one of the cool things about this tool is you can also use this to quickly add things like displacement now one thing I will say is you want to be a little bit careful with this like the way that this model is set up for example um if I just try to add the displacement right now uh it does a bunch of funky stuff and your model might crash um so what I want to do instead is I just want to take this geometry and I just want to separate it into its own geometry just to be save and I'm going to save before I do this as well but I'm just going to tab in edit mode and I just want to pick up the faces associated with this wall right here just so you can kind of see what we're doing and you do kind of want to think about this kind of thing ahead of time when you're modeling I mean obviously this is just an example model but what I want to do is I want to separate the selection into its own mesh right so now this is kind of its own thing in here but what we can do is is there are tools in here to set up displacement so what I can do is I can take this I can click on ADD displacement and it's got a couple different options right I can add a subdivision surface modifier which is going to subdivide this so that it has enough supporting geometry to be displaced um but you can also you could set this up with an actual displacement modifier if you wanted to but in this case we're just going to add the Sub Surf and the Adaptive subdivision and so when we do that if we jump over into rendered mode right so I'm just going to render this right here what's going to happen is notice how this brick wall and there's a little bit of funkiness going on with the geometry over here don't worry about that too much um but notice how we can scroll in here and we can adjust things like the height of that displacement and obviously we'd want to keep this kind of small still but this is basically automatically setting up our displacement for us um which is a huge Time Saver because otherwise you have to kind of like screw around with that yourself which is not my favorite thing in the world to do and again we've got some geometry overlapping over here don't worry too much about that for this example but um I mean that's what I really like about this tool is it just makes this whole thing really easy and so one other thing I like about this and we're just going to pick a simple plane and just move it over here just so you can kind of see is within this tool and let's pick up something like maybe a stone or a ground material so a ground material would probably be good but if I drop this onto this material right here we talked about the displacement well notice how there's an option in here to add the displacement modifier in here so if I add the displacement modifier in here and I think this needs to be UV mapped so I'm just going to rightclick and we're just going to do a simple Cube projection um but and so you don't always want to do this obviously because you need a bunch of supporting geometry in here for it to really work um but notice what this is going to do and I'm going to subdivide the whole thing just so it has a little more geometry to work with but what this is going to do is this is going to actually add a displace modifier in here and we want this to be fairly minor and I could add some additional subdivision but what that's going to do is that's actually going to displace the geometry in the 3D space in order to make something look actually bumpy so if you do want to displace the actual geometry in here there is definitely a tool that you can use in order to do that and so you'd obviously have to play around with it a little bit but you can and use this in order to create that more complex geometry inside of your scenes as actual displaced geometry and so with this sofa notice how what I can do is I can drag a different material on here really quickly and the material looks really good right it's already set up as a part of this add-on so I don't have to go through and mess around with a bunch of settings or anything like that these are just ready to go and they're lightweight because they're PBR materials as opposed to the other materials and so you can come in here and you can adjust things like the the contrast of the roughness map notice how when I do that um this is going to basically adjust how shiny this object is so you can come in here and you can adjust all of these materials so what I like about this is It's just set up and ready to go there's not a whole lot of like messing around with things that I have to do um you literally just pick the things that you want you drop them in here and you're good to go um so massive Time Saver um at least in my opinion with this tool which is why I like it all right so that's for I'm in this video there's a lot of great tools for working with materials but I really like this one I'd love to hear from you in the comments down below though what do you think and what tools are you using for your materials as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this and I'll catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The CG Essentials

Views: 6,152

Keywords: blender, blender 2.82, blender 2.8, blender modifier tutorials, blender tool tutorial, the blender essentials, the cg essentials, thecgessentials.com, justin geis, justin geis blender, blender 2.9, blender 2.91, blender add-on, blender materials, blender materialiq, blender material add-on

Id: LwBBKeDWYWw

Length: 11min 44sec (704 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 24 2024