Learn everything about materials in Blender. For beginners.

in this video we are going to clarify everything about materials and material Creation in blender so this video is going to be a bit long I think uh but I promise you will uh learn a lot of things especially if you're a beginner first of all if you want to understand what materials uh are in blender uh you look at uh the real world first don't jump into blender and try to create something first of all let's look at the real world uh everything around us what kind of objects we have around us because whatever you Mak in blender is a kind of something which you take from Real World right you are not going to make something that no one has ever seen right so materials can be two types surface and volumetric in blender but in reality we only look at the surface in real life by material we mean what any object is us usually is basically made of right for example if you are using a computer your computer is made of different parts and those parts are made of different materials right for example the screen is can be glass or uh the frame can be metal or plastic right or the table that you're sitting on or you're not sitting on the table I think you're just uh have you you have put everything on the table and the table is made of wood right so you have glass you have different materials and you only see them see the surface you don't necessarily see the inside of the material you don't have to but in in CG in computer Graphics there are volumetric materials too uh I will talk a bit more about this a a bit later so for example let's imagine uh you have uh clouds right in the sky how do you make them in blender you don't model them right you don't they are not 3D models they are kind of materials so in blender or in other CG software you create clouds using materials mostly simulations and simulations are visible to our eyes through materials so yeah these this is a bit more advanced topic but in this video we mostly uh covered the surface materials so let's go materials which you can make with textures image files right you can see wood around you right you can see metal objects around you you can find some Ceramics or some I don't know maybe or whatever right you can find some uh rubber or you can see some plastic objects right around you you will see paper right you can see paper around you and glass of course uh you will see glass for example the window of the the glass of the window for example or your cup as I said earlier we might see rocks Stones right we can see ground we might see fabric for example your clothes and whatever you have uh some fabric right cloes and other stuff and Leather So and more and more but these that I have shown you that you can see on the screen are uh the most basic materials that we see everywhere if you have any other materials if you think of any other materials or if you can see any other materials around you you can add to this list right but basically they are made uh in in blender in CG computer Graphics they are made in similar ways so there is no big difference between stone or rock and and ground right there is no big difference between Stone and the tree barks for us in real life they're completely different right or the stone and the flower might be different right the material of the flower because it's natural but for CG the advantage of computer Graphics is they are basically made in the s in a similar similar way uh because hopefully you don't touch and the materials in computer screen right so this is an advantage the computer doesn't have to worry about the uh actual material right it it's just the visualization so it's a good thing so let's move on to some special materials uh what about these emissive materials for example your phone screen your computer screen it emits light right it can turn on and turn off and it can light if you turn off your all the lights in your room and if you keep your laptop on it will uh give off light right it can light the room so in computer graphs in blender this a special type of material we might have some materials like for example wax wax right uh for example candle uh even your hands uh you can can see there is some light coming through your skin it's a special feature of of the human skin material right so we have this fabric uh and it has kind of you you see it's a it has special velvet effect on it or what about this uh kind of glossy carbon fiber material and this is an example of layered materials another special material and the last one I wanted to show you is this which is stylized kind of cartoony materials we can also make these types of materials in blender or in other CG software so yeah these are basically all of the materials that uh that you make or you use or you create most of the time in blender and a little about volumetric materials let's look at them I have a few examples for example clouds these are also materials in blender uh not necessarily a material in real life but in blender it's a kind of it it is made with materials also the fog it can be made with materials or these are basically the same things right fog and cloud and fire of course it's also made with materials of course there is a simulation part but in order to see it we need to have volumetric materials for this too so and there are some more more examples but these are not our Focus in this lesson because most of the time you will make surface materials not volumetric materials so now we have overall idea about materials in real life and uh about material Concept in in blender right so let's jump right into blender and try to make one of these materials now I'm in blender if you're a complete beginner uh I will just in case I'll will uh tell you uh some prerequisites before we can start this experiment so let's come here please come here in properties uh editor and change the render engine from whatever it is to Cycles because we need to see realistic materials and after that go to shading and if your shading is a bit different don't worry uh you just need to find this window which is this material preview window and let's uh press Z hovering over this window and and go to rendered now we have uh rendered option uh rendered View and let's create an environment first for that just come here and click on this color and environment texture but it is not necessary you can uh also come here uh by middle Mouse button I am just dragging this menu uh open this and you you can turn on scene world and you will see this why am I doing this because it's a better way of seeing the material effects now you should have automatically you should have the these two kind of boxy uh things these are called nodes and these are kind of functions which we might use uh to create materials we will use to to create materials right if you don't see them you probably don't have any materials and to create materials you come here to material properties and if you don't have anything like this empty space here you can create a new material by pressing on this new while you have selected the desired object let's click new and rename the material to test and now we can test everything here uh but now you have a problem if you're a complete beginner now you have a lot of things to understand here right so this is only one node this is only one function let's say but in blender you have a lot of things if you have used blender before how do you add stuff in blender by pressing shift and a you add more and more notes look how many notes you have here so a lot of notes right but you know what there is a very good news you can create almost any surface material with this one Noe so it's a really good news right you don't have to dig and find any other notes but actually if you want to make better materials you might need to use a few more not all of them certainly so don't worry about that if you are overwhelmed so first of all let's look at this principal bstf it's a type of Shader note I deleted it shift a Shader category and principal bsdf so this is connected to the surface I'm connecting it by just dragging and dropping uh to the pins from pins to the pins so it's connecting so this is the main function that help you to create any material so but there is a problem as I said there are a lot of things to cover here so you try to change the color okay let's change it oh now it's a bit orangey right let's turn on metallic it's metal right roughness what what what is what does this mean I what is Alpha what is subsurface specula a lot of things right so you get confused if you're a complete beginner so I'm going to help you with all of this I mean all of these things I will explain on the slides visually so let's go to the slides again and I will show you what each of these means and what they help us to make so let's go so first of all let's look back at uh what we had so we had surface and volumetric right we had surface materials and volumetric materials as you can see here so in blender as you saw we create surface materials with this principal bstf note which is a huge note and I just uh showed you what kind of things you have and it's a kind of problem if you're a beginner to understand all of these but I I'm going to show you just that and there is another note I showed you in Shader category you have principled volume you can search for this and you basically use this one note to create any volumetric uh material but uh we will talk about this probably in in a separate video in this video we will uh focus on this principal pstf note so let's go now uh let's look at the surface uh principle bstf node uh which creates any surface material as I said now what is this first thing first thing is base color and it is what it is uh you get the idea right you understand what it do it's just a color but this pin this yellow pin means we can connect images image files Yes you heard it right you can take a photo with your phone camera and uh send it to your computer and connect to this principal pstf just to see that photo on your 3D model so it's as simple as that you can connect uh image files to this so the next thing as you probably guessed it uh it decides if the material is metallic metal or not metal so one is fully metal zero is fully non-metal so the next thing is roughness it can be a bit strange a bit difficult to grasp but look what is what roughness is so zero roughness full roughness zero roughness full roughness so roughness simply means how glossy how shiny the surface of the material is of the model is completely glossy and full roughness zero glossy there is very uh little reflection on full roughness one zero by default it's 0.5 which is uh something in between so next what is this i i i r let's say so what does this number mean it's index of refraction so it's just an index it's just a kind of indicator or just the number which decides how much refraction we have so what is refraction what uh refraction is simply the bending of light so so you can see a really popular example of refraction if you if you write on Google what is refraction you will see a lot of examples just like this uh this number simply decides how much bending we have if it is one there is no bending you don't see any refraction like this we have uh so point 1.45 is kind of uh refraction of glass uh 3 or something is refraction of water and uh and Etc and yeah it's a bit Advanced topic if you want to know more about that you can just Google and do some research but basically we never touch this number so the next thing is Alpha it's simply transparency transparency uh there is a difference between transparency and transmission or this refraction stuff transparency is opacity in other software yeah in many other programs it's called opacity and it's the same thing in blender it's just transparency there is no light Breaking or bending uh transparency means Alpha means you simply allow uh to see what is behind the material so the next thing which is a really important thing uh normal so it's a special uh feature which can help us fake some depth some details which helps us fake details as you can see here this is without normal this is with normal normal is a kind of magic feature which allows uh 3D artists to fake these details without uh manually modeling these you know look how different it is this is without uh normal map this is with normal map so let's go to the next slide and look at the other options we have here so the next thing is subsurface subsurface is what allows us to fake this detail this kind of light coming through the edge or the so the next thing is specular specular is simply uh the reflections specular highlights are reflections on the on the glossy surface without metallic if you turn down metallic and if you turn down if you uh kind of bring this roughness down to zero Z and metallic zero you will see some Reflections on it if you have specular number these are all just numbers from one to from 0 to one if you have spec specular uh higher than one you will see some Reflections if you have spec specular zero you won't see any reflection so it's kind of something that we don't touch almost never so just like this we don't touch this specular value a lot so now uh the next thing is transmission so transmission what is transmission transmission is simply glass glass effect if you turn up transmission and bring down roughness you will have this effect glass with a little bit of Shadow so it's a really good way a very easy way to create glass of course there are more advanced ways to get rid of this Shadow and have more control over this kind of uh glass effect but basically transmission if you turn up transmission to one you will have glass and then we have coat this will allow us to create uh these types of layered materials actually there is only one layer not uh a lot of layers so because it's uh yeah it's just one layer on top of your material and then we have this Sheen option allows us to create this velvet effect and the last thing is emission which will help us to create emissive materials which the materials which give off light uh there is a difference between emissive materials and uh or real light objects in blender we have light objects which is the only purpose of light objects is to give off light but the emission is kind of uh makes the material emit light so it's a different concept so yeah here we go you have all the details of all of these uh I mean properties and Sliders now we're back in blender uh please take a screenshot of those the things that I just showed you the slides so now uh you can or we can check those let's create a UV sphere and make it smooth right click and smooth don't worry the I deleted the cube but the material doesn't get deleted uh at least uh uh for some time so you can find the material that we created uh for the cube by coming here to material preview and uh this and find test so this will show you all the materials in the splint file now let's test these things so color as I said metallic full metal as I said right let's change this uh HDR environment and have this this environment see we have this artifact in order to fix it we need more depth it is not necessary but let me add uh the modifier add modifier generate and subdivision surface uh just to get rid of this ugliness so yeah I think it's a bit better now let's delete this light too we don't need this light so yeah it's a bit better now now uh let's play around with these so you can see metal nonmetal and something in between will have zero metalness metallic so let's bring down the roughness as you can see fully metal zero roughness if zero metallic we have some specular Reflections as you can see and we can control the specular Reflections as I said from here more Reflections no reflection more Reflections no reflection so you understand what's specular and specular is something we never touch and we have index of refraction as I said it uh it will change the behavior of glass object let's make glass actually let's change the color back to White and open transmission if you remember transmission as I said it was glass and increase the transmission and create glass as you can see here glass bowl I have zero roughness so it's looking good if I have more roughness it's kind of frosted glass right so uh and this index of refraction as I said affects this glass effect let's bring it down bring it up and you can see uh this is something which changes this glass uh refraction Behavior so index of refraction transmission to make glass so and specular to uh remove the Highlight uh remove the reflections as you can see or bring the reflections back as you can see especially at the back of this you can see the effect so 0 five is the realistic so and the next uh one thing from here it is subsurface let me show subsurface in action let me delete this thing and and bring in monkey and while monkey is selected press controll 2 to give some more resolution by automatically adding subdivision surface modifier right click smooth and now let's add bring that material any material actually and let's say subdivision uh not subdivision sub surface skatter SSS in many situations it's called SSS in some program maybe and let's open sub surface and increase the weight uh change the color to kind of and increase the weight you have scale to control more subsurface like here I value for this too so you have this interesting subsurface effect going on right there as you can see so this is up surface we talked about specular transmission to make it glass clear coat let's bring up roughness and let's change the color let me uh add texture shift a texture and Checker texture let's connect this to this and change these two colors red and blue uh maybe not blue maybe yellow it looks better and now let's uh change this clear code weight as you can see now we have additional uh layer on top of our original material if you look carefully if you look it you can also tell that it's different by changing this color value tint value you have a tint on top of your original uh color here so this is code let's remove code and sheen sheen for uh fabric as as we saw let's create fabric it's easy shift a do what I do or if you don't want you don't have to shift a mesh plane let's go into edit mode by pressing tab on our keyboard s and move the cursor to make it a bit bigger press tab again to go out of edit mode press G and z and move your cursor up and again go into edit mode by pressing tab right click subdivide and subdivide a bunch of times like so press tab again to go out of edit mode and come here uh to physics properties and turn on cloth on this object and press this come to physics turn on collision now let's uh play uh press space bar to play and now we have this interesting cloth animation or simulation that's very easy right or uh you can go uh you can hold down shift and left Arrow key to go to the beginning of the animation and undo this Clause simulation uh select this Clause object and come to physics properties uh and you can turn on collisions uh open collisions and turn on self Collision this way you will have better collisions the Clause will not intersect with itself so now let's uh Play Again by pressing space bar now we have a bit better simulation here now right click shade smooth go to modifiers add subdivision surface modifier to make it a bit look a bit better let's give another material like velvet material so as I said Sheen will help you create velvet effect especially you'll see it here let's uh create something like this and Sheen and increase the weight as you can see it's much different now as you can see it's much different it it has some specular highlights here and there this is zero this is full and it's it looks more like material here it looks more like fabric here as you can see and the final thing is this emission so to create emission uh we can give emission to this let's bring remove it and increase the emission number just like that now it's emitting light we can check it by uh turning down the world strength down to zero and now you can see it's uh lighting the environment so this is everything but uh there is another problem and we're going to fix that too there is another problem what's the problem the problem is uh our materials do not look so great right these are very simple materials so these are not great these are not realistic so let's bring in a plane rx90 uh you don't have to do this if you can't Let's uh go to edit mode not edit mode let's give it generate and solidify you can use uh a simple Cube you don't have to create this wall and let's try to make uh brick so how do we make let's give a new material brick wall now how do make a brick wall or a stone wall how to create the material right this is a wool it's fine but how do you create a material definitely we are going to need some uh uh image files right so you don't want to draw bricks on this wall right so there is a good way of creating materials with image textures so now we are talking about uh texture Maps what are texture Maps texture maps are special image files which are taken by T taken by uh human beings with a photograph the purpose of image textures is to create some materials inside uh programs like blender or other 3D software all the games that you play on computer uh all of them use image textures so to kind of fake details to create great materials so they use image texture so let's uh find some image textures how do we find of course you can take your smartphone your iPhone or whatever you have and you can take a photo of for example brick wall in real life transfer that image to your computer and bring it into a blender and connect it but it doesn't look great because there are a lot of things to take into consideration before you can plug in any photo to your material uh first of all uh you don't have to do that because there are websites where you can download specifically made image textures to create so those materials so one of the websites I could recommend is called poly haven.com so let's go there and download some IM image textures now I'm in poly haven.com as you can see we have HD images uh which we don't talk about now and we have textures let's browse textures let's come to Brick and choose any brick that you want let's choose this brick go into it's free but uh uh you you can support uh because it's a really really fantastic website you you also have a blender add-on so you can see a few options here we have 4K we don't have to download in 4k because uh it's just for demonstration and if you click on this you will see some interesting things here you can download them as blend file or zip let's choose zip and uh download these actually you can exclude blend file or gltf file and you will only download these you can turn on what kind of format you have what kind of uh texture you have you don't I don't have I don't need Ambi inclusion I don't need this and I don't need displacement I don't need I need normal I need direct X and GL uh blender use open GL so we don't need direct X and roughness so only three textures and 14 mbes so so let's download them after you have downloaded uh you need to unzip you I think you probably know how to unzip files I think it's not very difficult now we have one uh image file in I think jpeg format and two in open XR format so uh because these need more detail this is why these are in richer format so let's bring these inside blender so it's very easy you can just drag and drop let's drop in the color and let's drop drop in this normal and let's drop in this roughness so now let's connect plug these in and see how they work color to base color and immediately you see these brick uh texture this brick texture it's it's great right so but it doesn't look very realistic right it doesn't look very realistic it's very flat and kind of boring right it uh even your if you have a son even your young son doesn't believe that it's a real W right I have a very young son this is why I'm talking about Sons so the this is this is roughness rough you can see this name I think roughness so let's plug into roughness roughness roughness to roughness and it is a bit better right so and then we have this normal but unfortunately you don't directly uh plug this normal to normal so if you remember you can see normal will help us create this uh interesting effect details uh or depth fake depth with just an image file look this is without normal this is with normal and it will do the same in our case uh just now so let's plug in normal but unfortunately as I said we are not going to plug it directly like this we need another note shift a vector and normal map we will uh color to color normal to normal and now suddenly you see interesting effects does it look more realistic now you can call your sound and show this hey does it look realistic now and it looks realistic now he can believe that it's very realistic and you know what it will react to light that's very uh great so let's bring in a light shift a light point and let's G to move this and look it look how the Shadows are uh kind of reacting to This Light it's it looks insanely realistic right with only an image file we haven't modeled anything it's just a plane with a solidy modifier uh this is uh how powerful these T textures can be so everything that you you see in games all those uh walls or other things these are made possible with these textures so so as we have seen we have created uh a lot of uh we have learned a lot of things I think hopefully and we created a wall material but uh even still uh we kind of you you kind of feel that you don't have enough control you don't have enough control over uh what kind of materials you can create create right even even all of with all of these techniques you think that you are still a bit limited right in terms of what kind of materials you can create uh and the materials that we are we have uh learned about and we have created do not Le do not look uh very great right so what's the secret to create great materials so the secret to create great materials is using all of these techniques in combination by combining different features of a material so in know to create great materials you need variety you need combination of all of these features you need blending and mixing different uh features of a material so this is how you create amazing materials as you can see here we have an example of blender's uh great open movie for example look at this uh metal object uh so there are some imperfection there's some imperfections here and there's a combination of different materials here shiny metal black metal some uh glass and some uh emission some little screen with some information on it and some dirt in some areas as you can see some metal some edges are uh kind of worn out and everything as you can see his cap is not uh Perfect Right hat and everything as you can see this is made of I think car tire and dirt buil up so a lot of imperfections and a lot of detail so this is how you uh usually make materials and if you want to support this Channel please consider uh trying my full blender course on udemy or on blender Market the links will be in the description so please check that out if you buy the course and learn you will support this channel if you buy the course on blender Market you will support blender to and you will learn a lot of things because everything I just described here will be in the course and you will have a lot of knowledge there so yeah so as I said the best materials are created by mixing blending different features right so let's quickly uh get over that let's quickly uh try to stand it right let's give it a material a very simple material a color uh or a darker color so yeah this is very Bland and this is very boring right just one color this why it's not very interesting but we can uh improve it uh by mixing or blending different materials so what how do we mix two things two colors or two textur well there is a mix Shader or mix color so first let's use mix Shader I think this is enough uh to be able to understand everything you learned how to you you you have learned what kind of uh node we use but we haven't learned how to use it for that you need to understand a really really important uh concept which is the which is this so all of these numbers if you look there are a lot of numbers numbers a lot of Sliders right and numbers here all of these can be driven uh by color and what what kind of color I well uh black and white so black and white is really important so we can drive all these sliders all these numbers with black and white black being zero white being one so let me demonstrate this so here I have two image files which is just white and black so let me bring those into blender and see what they do now let me delete this uh you can uh press contrl and X to delete this and keep the keep the connection connect this color to white and as you can see it's white if you plug white it will give the value of one so let's check it now it's fully metal because I'm plugging in white right as it uh this is the same as turning it up uh all the way to one as you can see here let's plug one here and black is zero so let's make roughness zero as you can see I'm driving the values with colors but just black and just white is not very useful because you can simply do this right and uh why are they really important then well because uh we can have one image with black and white information now as you can see I have some more textures with black and white information at the same time so now uh let's look at this this is yeah something like this not very important uh let's plug this to color and see what it looks like as you can see we have uh made the monkey a bit more beautiful than before right so the this part is white and whenever if I plug this image to any any sockets these parts will get full one value and the dark part parts will be zero so if I plug this into metallic the white parts will be full metal and the uh black parts will be zero metallic so let's plug this in and as you can see these white white parts are full metal so what I want to do is uh in blender now you will you have the ability to kind of invert this just search for invert shift a and write invert invert color and you can plug this to color and this color to metallic now all the black parts are metal uh the white part is not metal I'd like to make a uh the white part metal and white part fully uh zero roughness so I will plug this and do this and as you can see white part is zero metal uh full metallic and zero roughness so now you can see the effect right now you can see the power of different uh colors black and white and mixing and you can do the same here for example let me uh mix two colors let's mix uh let's have mix mix color let's bring in two colors blue and red and use this black and white texture as a factor I'm using this black and white texture as a separator not just color information as you can see right and we can still uh kind of plug this into metallic and shift a invert color oh sorry should plug this in here and this here just like that as you can see now it's more interesting right we can control color metallic roughness and everything so it's a bit too complicated for you if you're a beginner but I what I wanted to show you is simply uh we drive different properties different numbers with black and white color and this will give us a lot of control over what kind of uh material we need and I will show you one more one last thing so now imagine you want to decide is uh where should be white and where should be black of course uh there are a few ways blender will allow you to do this in a few ways you can basically paint whatever you want to white and black it's it gives you I think think all the control that you need so you don't need any more control than that if you can paint you can paint all these uh details by yourself or there are some procedural ways some automatic ways so let's bring in ambient occlusion color uh ENT occlusion information and let's see what it does as you can see this is what it does and you don't have to do this I'm just showing you that these are also possible you can decide what is white what is black just like that and now you can use this information uh to control the colors mix RGB we need uh color mix color uh not color but now you can see I can control color with with this automatic uh ambient occlusion uh so yeah this is just an example of with uh mixing colors and adding blending colors right and using different notes we have a lot of notes which can help us create amazing materials so yeah this this was everything I wanted to show you of course there are uh many many nodes which will allow you to create any complex material in blender so again and if you want to learn those please uh consider checking out my full blender course on Udi and on blender market and this if you buy that that course and learn blender uh this way you can also support this channel yeah thank you uh see you in the next lessons

Channel: Unreal Blender

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Id: 8WlEB_A1BW0

Length: 44min 44sec (2684 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 09 2024