Is this the FASTEST Materials Add-On? (Material Works 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 for quickly adding materials and also adding things like procedural damage to them let's go ahead and just jump into it all right so material works is an add-on from the guys over at blender Bros and it's specifically designed to create a very simple material workflow inside of blender so um it's got a library of multiple different things uh it's got different Metals it's got plastic sticks it's got some other things like that that you can use inside a blender as well as some other tools that do things like uh like making your Corners not look as sharp other things like that so I will link to material works in the notes down below uh two things to note about that first it is an affiliate link meaning if you do purchase through that link I do receive a commission and I did receive a free version of this from the guys over at blender Bros just to give it a try um but let's take a look at the way that this works so so when you first purchase this add-on there's a bunch of different stuff in here and it can be a little bit overwhelming um not that big of a deal but there are some things that you do need to know you're going to want to download the add-on file as well as the different materials files and the wear files that are in here so these BB materials as well as the dents stains rust Etc you're going to want to bring those down and so the first thing you want to do is you want to install this material Works 1.1b zip file so when you do that right you go to edit preferences and you want to install that tool so it's going to look something like this right here when you install that except you're not going to have any pads in here so the pads is going to be where you link to the different folders having to do with material works okay and so this is a little bit confusing um not that big of a deal once you understand it but you need to make sure that your folders are set up properly for this to work and so when you first download this you're going to have a bunch of zip files that look like this and so all of these are going to need to be extracted and put in a couple folders so all of your Edge wear folders need to be extracted and placed inside of a folder labeled underscore wear like this we'll take a further look at that in a second um your other materials so your 4K materials need to go in a folder labeled BB materials 4K and they need to be labeled a b c d and e again a little odd that they're not just just labeled that way to begin with but um it's not that big of a deal it's just renaming a couple folders if you look inside of them it's going to have folders for each one of these materials that's in here um and then you also want to extract the BB materials 1K and just put it in a folder that looks like this right here okay so one other thing which is also a little bit strange so when you extract your wear and you put them in the folder a couple of these have folders inside of them which and so it's a little bit odd cuz you can't have nested folders in here if you do that it's not going to work so like for example your rust folder you're going to want to take these two folders and you're just going to want to label them rust and rust uncore particles same thing for stains and the stained smudge you just want to take the stain smudges out of the folder and rename it something like this um otherwise they're not going to show up as options so little bit odd um not that big of a deal if you just look at the way that mine is set up right here so this is how the wear is set up this is how the BB materials 1K is set up and this is how the BB materials 4K is set up like this then you're going to be fine don't worry about the stone tiles that is a custom material which we're going to talk about in a minute but now if we jump back over into blender and take a look at this what you want to do is you want to link this to the folder you want to link this to this material Works folder that these are all in then it's going to find those BB materials one K 4K and the wear folder right here and so once you do this and you may have to restart blender in order to get this to show up make sure that you've enabled the add-on what it's going to do is it's going to give you a little window over here in the in panel so if you tap the in letter key over here that's going to pop up a little window right here and so the way this tool works is you just select an object and you click in here and you can see previews of your different materials and you just pick one and apply it to your object right so if I pick this hex steel right here it's going to apply that hex steel to my object and so you can use either the generated UV mapping or your object UV mapping like this note that if you scroll down there are options over here to do things like adjust the scale of your material as well as adjusting the rotation of your material so if you wanted that to rotate something like that you can do that down below so note that if you do get the second version of this so I'm going to go ahead and apply a coated titanium material to this and add some wear like this notice how UV mapping something like this can be a little bit frustrating um so you just have to come in here and mark up a bunch of seams and other things like that so if I mark this to the if I set this to the UVS for example notice how that's not really going to do what we want um if you do get that second version there's a UV assist tool that comes along with it that can make that a lot easier so say I've got this object right here you can click on the option for seam it up so I'm going to tab edit mode so you can actually see that um but notice what it does it comes in here and it marks out the various seams then you can click on the option for unwrap it so when you do that notice how you can use the UV Checker material to make sure that it's doing it properly um but then once you're done you can just click on once you're done with the unwrap it notice how this has actually come in here and this has mapped that material so that you're not getting those issues in here so this is kind of like a simple UV unwrap tool it's not like massively complicated or anything like like that but if you do want a little bit of help with the UV assist um you can use that add-on that comes with the more expensive version of material works now one thing I will say about this add-on and we'll go ahead and pick like this Co titanium first off it doesn't have the biggest library of materials in the world it has 50 materials in here a lot of them are either like these carbon fibers the metals are kind of like the rubber materials in here so um it's definitely not um it's it's definitely not like the largest collection of materials that I've seen um but the whole goal of this one is for this uh kind of fast hard surface modeling to really simplify the process of setting up these materials really quickly and so the other thing where this gets really powerful and we'll talk about it in a second is the ability to add the wear in here all right so just like right up front the power of this particular material add-on is the speed at which it allows you to apply things to objects and add things like procedural damage and other things like that so um it's definitely not designed to be like a comprehensive hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of materials add-on um it also doesn't have a ton of like Ultra procedural things so like Sanctus library for example has a bunch of procedural materials um if you're looking for a massive library of materials you might look at something like material where this really shines though is it really gives you the ability to come in here and add these materials quickly to objects so what I can do is I can just pick them I can place these materials in here and I can start making adjustments and so like for example you can adjust things like the scale of the material right I can make this bigger or smaller down below you can also toggle between using the object UV mapping and the generated UV mapping in here um but again this is designed to help you set these materials up really quickly right so you can come in here and you can use the sliders to adjust the roughness the metallic and it's just super fast um so that's kind of the whole goal of this whole thing though you can bring in your own custom materials in here as well and they will have kind of a lot of the same options in here so um that's super powerful as well but say that you wanted to apply something this object so maybe I went with uh maybe this like steel one of these steel floors maybe this one right here say I wanted to adjust some things about that like the color map I can scroll down here and I can pick colors then I can use the slider right here in order to adjust the colors and so one of the things that's really cool about this tool is the wear functions um that you have contained in here that's what those maps that we were playing around with are for right so let's say for example this object I wanted to add some wear I can click on the wear option right here and what's that what that's going to do is that's going to give me access to some of these different wear items so for example say I wanted to add some dents in here I can just pick the dents off of this list so what you can do is you can pick any of those things in here so you can pick like the scratches you can pick the stains and it's going to apply them to these objects really quickly and note that these kind of Stack together right and this one has an edge wear applied to it right now I'm going to go ahead and take that away and just put this on scratches but you can adjust things like the strength of the scratches in here as well as things like the scale of the scratches so you can make it bigger or smaller and you can rotate it move it on the surface now one thing I would like to see in the future that we're not currently seeing is I don't really see any way that you can apply this to specific areas um unless I'm just missing it which is always a possibility but I'm just not necessarily seeing that right now but you can layer the wear um or you can also do things like if I click on the wear right here say I wanted to bring in a rust wear material right so I've got the DSE right here as well as the Ed Edge wear but I'm going to get rid of the edge wear I'm going to add rust like this and so the rust actually does a really interesting job of adding kind of like damage and then rust in here to your object now one thing you can do is you can click on the drop down right here and there's different variations of the different wear types right so I can pick this rust right here notice how these all look a little bit different one thing I would recommend when switching between these rust pieces is I would highly recommend saving your model before you mess around with them too much just cuz these are a little bit heavier now one thing I do want to point out and I'm going to go ahead and add a 3point light system using three-point lights add-on right here so I'm going to bring this down whoops and bring these a little bit closer one thing I want to note is if you toggle over into Cycles you're going to get a better result right some of the stuff that's going on with some of these uh with some of these different wear patterns look a lot better when you jump over into Cycles but notice how I can make this look Rusty really fast but again you can adjust things like the scale of that rust to make it bigger or smaller you can adjust the normal which is going to make it look smoother or bumpier like this and you can also adjust the strength of that wear layer in here but again notice how this looks a little bit different inside of Cycles than it does inside of your material preview mode so definitely make sure that you preview those rendered because they are going to have some better results in here when you do render them out and note that there's also an edge wear function in here so let's go ahead and let's pick something else um and notice how by the way you can click the drop down in here to see different material types so like for example if I was to switch this over to this midnight steel um we can toggle into that wear pattern right here and what I want to do is I want to add just an edge wear in here and so what that edge wear is going to do and let's go ahead and let's add a color just so we can see it um so we'll say that edge wear is going to have this like purple look to it what that edge wear is going to do is first off I'm going to bring the strength up but it's going to pick edges in here and it's going to add wear around those edges like this and notice how if I adjust the width I'm getting more or less of this in here I have not quite figured out how those edges are actually picked in here I'm going to bring this strength up again just so you can see it a little bit better notice how it's picking certain edges and it's adding where based on the width that you select um and these do definitely give you different results if you pick the different options in here right so if I jump over to D it's going to give me a completely different look and it is resetting me every time that I do this so again I'm just kind of toggling this on but notice how if you set that with the something low it's going to basically add this wear to these edges it would be nice if I could come in here and set like a Vertex group or use like a creasing of the seams or something like that I have not figured out how to do that that doesn't mean it's not necessarily in here but I have not figured out how to custom set where those edges are going to be but again you can kind of Stack this so if I added another wear layer I can put the dust on top of this so I can make it look like it's worn and then Dusty or you could do the dust first and then put the wear on top of it you can adjust the order in which these are added using the up and down right here but again like this dust I might set like a lower strength right here but then I could also add some scratches in here and again notice if I set those scratches I can also adjust the color applied to those scratches just by toggling this up I'm going toggle the strength on right here just because picking these neon colors gives you a good look at what this damage is doing I'm going to go ahead and get rid of the Dust cuz I feel like it's taking away from the other stuff um but I'm going to bring the scale up on this one but notice how for adding procedural damage to objects this works really quickly so again I think this add-on is something that you can use very quickly um you don't necessarily have the control I've maybe seen in some other places like a like a fluent materializer or something like that but what this does is it's very simple right I don't have to come in here and learn a bunch of nodes or anything like that in order to apply these materials in here so from that standpoint it is very powerful and so let's talk just a little bit about adding custom materials in here so you can also add your own custom materials to the library so if I toggle over here for example um let's say that I wanted to bring something in from like poly Haven so we're going to go find something from poly Haven and we'll go with this concrete floor worn material and I'm going to make make sure that I'm downloading the ambient occlusion diffuse um normal and roughness Maps um I don't think this one does so material Works doesn't really do much with displacement so you don't need to do very much with that one so we're just going to bring in these maps and so again naming is really important in this tool when you bring in custom materials so like for example what we want to do with this one is instead of having this say AO we want this to say ambient occlusion so it's actually going to look for these words and if you don't have them in here it's not going to find the material we're going to call this one diffuse we're going to call this one normal we'll call this one roughness and so you can have the name of the material over here on the left hand side but then what you want to do is you want to take this folder and you want to name it whatever you want this to be so we're going to do concrete floor warn 001 but I'm going to take that I'm going to cut it and you're going to go into your materials folder and you're just going to paste it in here like this and so you can go in here and I think you can click on this button and click on refresh library and when you do that it's going to go through and it's going to look for additional materials so in this case right that's a concrete floor notice how that concrete floor is actually going to show up up in here right so if I click on this this is going to add that concrete floor from the maps that we had in there and so what you can do is you can actually put all of your materials in here no matter where you've gotten them from and you can use them as a part of this workflow so again notice how that's bringing that in here and I can adjust things like the scale that texture you can type in higher values in here so if I type in a value of three then that's going to bring the three in but now that I've added add that in here as a part of my material library and I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to add a 3point light system again like this we'll toggle over into rendered mode but this material is going to work with things like your wear and your bevel right so if I add the bevel right you can see how that's going to give me kind of a beveled look around along the edge right here and you can adjust the width of that make sure that it's close to the width of your Edge otherwise it's not going to work it's just going to give you this kind of like weird fading effect in here so you want to adjust the width but you can use that bevel function in order to make your edges look beveled right here but then you can also add wear so for example I can add the dents and the edge wear and other things like that to this object just with a single click and then I can adjust the strength I can adjust the normal other things like that and again the power of this tool is just in the speed right it's not NE necessarily in the hugeness of the library but what this does especially if you're doing hard surface modeling is it does really give you a fast workflow for adding your own materials in here like for example I have a stone tiles material that I also downloaded from poly Haven and again all I had to do is drop those maps in there but again I can add things like wear to the surface and they actually look really good right I've got the dents in here but I can pick other wear patterns like this in order to add those different details in here and so I think from uh setting things up quickly and being able to add things like this damage and other things like that um this add-on allows you to do that very fast and I think that's really the power of this tool now there are some things like for example I wish you had the ability to kind of like break up the tiling of some of these a little bit um like it doesn't look bad in here um and we'd probably bring the strength down anyway because that's pretty strong we don't necessarily need it to be that strong um but I do wish there were some things you could do to kind of like break up the tiling or set this where the uh damage was only applied in certain areas as of right now that doesn't appear to be something that's available in this version but maybe it'll get at it in the future um but overall again just from a speed standpoint I think this is something that can fit in a lot of workflows all right so that's where I'm going to in this video leave a comment below let me know what you think about material Works what your favorite add-on is for materials and blender I just love having that conversation with you guys as always thank 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: 2,745

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 materials, blender damage, blender material damage, blender materialworks, blender material works, blender materialworks add-on

Id: qXXHbOoIlzI

Length: 19min 33sec (1173 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 07 2024