MATERIALS For Absolute Beginners - Blender Tutorial

hey guys and welcome to another very exciting tutorial in the last part for this absolute beginner to trial series we looked at modeling and blender and created this little treasure chest or trunk in this video I want to show you how to create customize and apply materials to the objects in your scene so we can take this boring little treasure chest and turn it into something with a wooden body and metal detailing once again this is going to be an absolute beginner tutorial and the only reason that difficulty meter doesn't read a1 is because I will assume that you have watched the previous videos in this series and know the basics of how to use blender but now enough talking let's jump right into the tutorial welcome back to blender the scene I have opened here is exactly where we left off in my absolute beginner tutorial for how to do modeling if you don't have this scene or maybe you just want a clean start you can find a download link to this file in the description of the video now I am not much of a 3d artist and there's probably about a million things that we could do to make this trunk or treasure chest look a whole lot better or at least passable but in this tutorial I really want to focus on the fundamentals of working with materials in blender however before we get into it I want to address an issue that I've totally lost over in my last tutorial and that is that if you look at your trunk or treasure chest right now you can see that the body of the trunk is a whole lot brighter and this lit that we've modeled is really really dark the reason for this is that I did not properly fix up our normals after I've modeled out this lid now if you're just getting into working with 3d let me explain what normals are let's select the litter of our trunk and go into edit mode by pressing tab on the keyboard let's zoom in just a little bit and let's change over to vertex let's mode which you can do either from the header in your 3d view down here or just press ctrl and tap and then switch over to vertex select mode so now you can see all of the individual vertices for this lid when you create a polygonal model in a 3d application every vertex will have its own normal vector this vector will or well at least it should point from the vertex outputs from the surface and this normal vector is really important for your rendering because it gets used for calculations for lighting reflections refractions and if those normals aren't set up correctly like they are right now with this lid it's gonna look all sorts of strange if you want to see the normals in blender simply hover over your 3d view and press n to bring up this little properties tab on the side let's come down and you will find a section for displaying the normals on your mesh on the left side let's select displaying the vertex normals s lines and now we can actually make this a little bit larger as well over on the right-hand side if you drag out this size a little bit you can see the normals going a bit bigger and if we zoom in the weird thing is you will see that these normals don't seem to actually emerge from the vertices they're kind of coming from elsewhere and what has actually happened is that because of the way I extruded this lid in the last part of this tutorial my normals are inverted let's select a couple of vertices here and press : on the keypad kind of the zoom in on them let me just flip this over you can see that the normals of these vertices are actually pointing into the mesh they're all going the wrong direction and that is why the lighting on this lid is so weird so let's quickly fix that up and the easiest way to do that is simply press K on your keyboard twice to select absolutely everything come down into the head of the 3d view select mesh come up into normals and then simply select to recalculate outside or press ctrl + n let's like that and now if you zoom in you should see that at every vertex you have a clean normal defiant that is pointing outwards from the service and you may have noticed that now our lid is no longer this weird dark color because now lighting calculations are correct we should be good to go however before I move on just to be safe let's exit edit mode select the bottom of our trunk press tab to go to edit mode let's switch over to the vertex select mode press a a to select everything and again just come in to mesh normals and recalculate outside just in case there's something else that I've missed so now we know the normals are fixed up on the as well as the lead for our trunk let's press tap again to get out of edit mode and let's finally get to applying some materials to this trunk when working with materials in blender I highly recommend that you use the cycles rendering engine so at the very top in your main menu bar make sure that this drop-down is set to the cycles render engine otherwise the options you have for working with materials are going to be rather limited right now I'm seeing a solid shaded view of my scene here but I'd really like to see how this would look like with the materials applied for that let me quickly hide this tab on the right side again just how about with the 3d view and press and to hide it and let's split this view so we can get a rendered view for that come up into the top right hand corner of the 3d view to these three diagonal lines and click and drag left to split our 3d view into and on the left side I obviously don't need this tool panel twice so with the mouse over the 3d view press T to hide this panel on the left side and come down into the header of the 3d view and change to your display mode from solid over to rendered this is going to render our scene with all of the materials applied and the cool thing is that I can still move around in this view obviously it takes a second or two to render depending on the speed of your machine actually I'm going to make this a little bit smaller and any panel you create in blender you can just come over the edge of it until your cursor changes to this double arrow let's drag this further to the left I really just want a very small preview of it because I mainly want to work in the right side to work with the material itself in this main 3d view here so that's kind of good enough and now let's check out the materials that are currently applied to the body of our trunk for that come over to the right side of your interface and in the properties panel at the very top you'll find a whole bunch of different options and fairly far to the right you find this little round sphere and that is the material tab so let's select the material tab and this now displays all of the materials for the object that we have selected in our scene right now the body of our trunk guest is really exciting default material applied to it and you can see that over on the right hand side right here there's a material applied to it called material you can actually double click the name and rename this so maybe I'll actually call this default material and then a little bit further down you have a bunch of different tabs and options and the most important one properly is your preview so let's expand that and drag it out and this will actually give you a little preview of what this material would look like rendered on an object and over on the right hand side you can actually change what is being rendered in this little preview window so you can render it on a plane on a sphere on a cube a monkey head or some grass so this just gives you a nice little idea of what this material would look like a little bit further down you will find the surface options and right now all you can change is the diffuse color so you can simply click on this to bring up the color picker and then change this to any color you want and you will see this color update both in the 3d view also in our rendered 3d view as well as in this little preview window now the material system in blender when you're using the cycles render engine is actually built on a nodal workflow what that means is that you can actually build entire networks of shaders and textures and graphics and all sorts of other elements and kind of feed them all together to define a single texture or a single type of surface however working with nodes and the node editor available in blender is going to be a topic of a more advanced tutorial for now you can simply unlock some additional cool options simply by clicking on this used nodes button down here in this surface tab this will unlock a number of really useful properties directly here in this material panel for example you can now change the surface so you can actually change the shader itself that is used for this material right now this is set to the diffuse be SDF and psdf stands for bi-directional scattering distribution function and all that really means is that this is a shader that scatters the light that hits it so you can actually click on the selector you have a whole bunch of different options so you've got shaders for diffuse backgrounds glass glossy hair mixing things together two shaders there's a huge amount of cool stuff here for now I'm just going to leave this on the diffuse be SDF you can still also change the color to anything that you want maybe we will select a really nice saturated blue then you have this roughness option as well as some options for you normal so we're going to get into these a little bit later when we actually starting to create the materials now one thing that catch me a little bit of God is that once you've enabled the noddle workflow and changed the color of your material like this saturated blue you may notice that the preview window is blue our rendered views blue but our 3d view still has this pink color the original color that we've assigned and that is happening because now with this more advanced workflow the color of the material that actually disconnected from the preview color if you want to change this over you can come into the material tab and at the bottom you'll find these settings you can open that up and you can actually change just the viewport color so again it's just you have more options of doing what you want but obviously these two colors are now kind of unlinked so you have to manage that yourself but that's not a big deal just in case you're confused why it's not doesn't seem to be updating that's probably why let's get started actually applying some useful materials to our little treasure trunk so it looks like it's mainly made out of wood with some metal detailing for that with the body of the trunk still selected in the material tab I don't actually want to use this default material so I'm actually going to delete it and this one here at the very top are actually material slots so you can make this a little bigger and you actually have the options of removing and adding different material slots and each material slot can hold a single material so right now there's just one slot which has two default material assigned you can add more slots on the right-hand side here with this plus item so he pressed that you now edit a new material slot and for this slot you can either create a new material or on the left hand side you've got this little drop-down selector and if you click that all you have in your scene right now is just this default material so you can select the default material and assign it to this slot as well and you create another slot etc etc but for now I'm just going to delete these slots again so to select the slot press - to delete it - and - and I will under sign all of the materials and in our rendered view on the left hand side you can see the treasure chest is being rendered without any materials if you now come up here into the right hand side for your material editor and let's create a new slot so a new slot for a new material and in the selector you may notice that we still have this default material available you may wonder how do you actually delete delete a material in blender once you no longer need it what actually happens is that when you save you seen all unused materials will be delete so that is actually an important thing to know if you create really cool materials but you don't assign them to anything near scene when you save your blender file all orphaned data which includes unused materials will be discarded so because I don't actually use it I'm just gonna ignore this instead I'm actually going to select my first material slot here I'm actually going to make this materials panel a little bit smaller since we only really have a single slot and let's press new to create and assign a new material this material I do kind of want to use for that wooden look of the main part of this treasure chest and so I'm going to double click this material and rename it to wood let's come down to the settings and I'm going to leave the shader on the diffuse be SDF it's one of the simplest ones to work with and as I said we're going to get into the whole node editor and the really complex materials in some later to Charles for now we're just going to keep it pretty simple so let's select the color let's change this over to like a wooden e Brown it's probably bit too bright as well over on the right hand side you can drag down the brightness so let's make this a little bit darker and I do like this split view here because it shows me what this material would actually look like rendered so I can kind of get a feeling for the color it would have not quite happy with it yet it's going to drag this around a little bit maybe a bit less red but I'm going to make this a little bit darker as well I kind of want this really oaky dark type of wood and that doesn't actually look too bad now what am i doing I might actually hover over the right 3d view press T to hide this tools tab on the left side as well let's make this a little bigger again cuz otherwise it's just going to be a little bit hard to see them zoom in a little bit on my rendered view so we can see this material just a little bit better now let's talk about this roughness value the roughness is really exactly what it says it's essentially the roughness of your surface with a roughness value of zero this surface is perfectly smooth so what's going to happen is that light hitting it from one side will create a little bit of a highlight because the light is kind of reflects off just a little bit if however in this little preview and I'm just gonna make this a little bigger so it's a bit easier to see as well and maybe we'll select this monkey head because and kind of see the detail a little better if I'm jacking up this roughness value now you can see that the little highlights once I've appeared the surface just appears a whole lot more flat there's just less of this diffuse highlight happening around the edges where the light is hitting it so I don't want to jack this up to one and I don't want to have it on zero because if this was would probably have a little bit of a texture a little bit of roughness to it so maybe I'm just going to Jack this up two point three is probably not too bad and again just tweak this to your liking I really just want to give you a rough idea of how to use this no pun intended so now we have this wooden e material assigned to the body of our trunk and let's select the lid of our treasure chest right now in the materials tab there is no material assigned to it and you can either create a slot first and then assign a material to it but you can also simply come up into the material selector here on the left hand side click that and you'll see default material and our wood material it's going to select this wood material and that is going to create a slot for me and then assign this wood material into it so let's click that and there you go the wood is now also assigned to the lid of our little treasure trunk and while this does look better than where we started already one thing that this treasure trunk is really missing are all of the metal detailing all of these little lines and details that we've added in the modeling tutorial because I really want them to be nice and shiny and metallic however our treasure trunk really just consists of two objects within our scene we have the lid and we have the body so how do we assign multiple materials to essentially the same object in order to assign more than one material to the same object in your scene or to the same mesh you will have to use edit mode which shouldn't really come as that much of a surprise for that let me zoom in a little bit on my 3d view and let me make the panel on the right hand side just a little bit smaller so it's just a bit easier to see let's select the body of our trunk press tab to go into edit mode and now I do want to change this over to face selection mode and again I can do this in the header of my 3d view on the right hand side here I've got face selection mode or since I just love all of the shortcut keys ctrl tab and then press F to go into face selection mode let's press a to unselect everything and now just let's select these two big faces here on the side so right click one hold down shift to right click the other so now we've got these two faces selected and now let's create a new material and assign it only to these two faces again let me make this panel a little bit bigger first we need to create a new material slot because we only have one slot for this mesh and it's already taken up by this wooden oaky material so let's first create a new slot and we now need to either assign an existing or create a new material and assign it into this slot since we don't yet have a metal material in our scene and that's what I want to end up using for all of the details on my treasure trunk I'm doing to come up into the material editor and press the new button to create a new material let's come up double-click on the name and I'm going to call this material metal let's come down a little bit and I'm actually going to change my preview over to the monkey head hey I like looking at monkey heads but also it makes it a whole lot easier to see what this material would look like on a more detailed object and now in the surface tab I'm actually going to change my shader from the diffuse be SDF over to the glossy psdf which is a reflective shader so let's select that and immediately you will see our monkey head is now this really shiny mirror like material however if we look over on the left hand side in our rendered view well everything is still the same boring wouldn't need color we haven't actually assigned this material yet to the faces that we have selected so with those two faces still selected simply come up into your material tab make sure you have the metal material slot selected and press the assign button to assign this slot to those faces so let's press assign and now over on our rendered view we now have this metallic material assigned to these two faces let's come back into our material tab and come down a little bit to the surface options and you do have a few more options here if for this particular glossy shader for one you could change the distribution but that's a little technical so I'm just going to leave this on ggx just leave it on the default you can actually change the color of your metallic or reflective material and so you can kind of shift this to yellow-green any other color I just go to leave this on as white as I can because I don't really want to tint this metal maybe just shift it off a little bit into yellow so it looks a little bit more golden eor brassy or just a little bit older I prefer shifting everything off-white pure white and pure black tend to look a little bit unnatural in 3d rendered scenes and now again you will find this roughness option right now our metal material is a perfect mirror it's perfectly smooth and it reflects a hundred percent of the light that hits it now that does look a little bit unrealistic for what we're trying to go for and for that you can actually increase the roughness value to again simulate the surface of this metal being a little bit rough just having a little bit of detail on top so it just gets a little bit more diffuse if you check out this monkey head here or just the side of our trunk with a roughness value of zero there perfectly reflecting all light that hits them so as we ramp up this roughness value you can see it's turning into this more diffused metallic color this really nice shiny metallic material and if you push this all the way you have almost no reflections anymore but obviously this doesn't really look like metal anymore it's starting to look a little bit more like stone or rock so I'm actually going to bring down this roughness to maybe I'll go point one I still want this to be pretty reflective I just don't wanted to be a perfect mirror because they're just going to look a little bit weird yeah that looks a little bit better it's just it just doesn't look as perfectly reflective and so it just looks a little bit more like actual metal wood and be aware that of course you can make this look a whole lot better once you get into using note editor and some of the advanced tools available in blender but again that is going to be a topic for more advanced tutorial what I want to do with the rest of this video is to actually assign the metal material to well the actual metal parts of our trunk because right now we just made two of the sides metallic which makes no sense whatsoever so what I'm going to do is I'm going to well either we select the faces or if you still have them selected make sure that those two metallic faces are selected or technique you can strike everything anyways come up in our material tab select the wood material slot and let's press assign to assign that material back and what I now want to do is actually just want to select all of these little tells around the edges of my trunk because that's really where I want to assign this metal material to to make my life a little bit easier I'm going to shrink down my rendered view just so I see more of my actual 3d view maybe I'll just zoom out a little bit so I can still see my entire treasure trunk and I can just double check what I'm doing I'm also going to quickly exit out of edit mode select the lid of my treasure chest and press H to hide it because otherwise it's going to get a little bit in the view so it's going to press H to hide it let's select the body of our trunk press tap to get into edit mode and let's start selecting all of these little details along the outside of our box press a to unselect everything and you can technically come in here and kind of shift select all of these faces that you want to assign the metal material to but you might go a little bit crazy doing that so what I'm going to do again press a to unselect everything press seven to go into top view and press five to go into orthographic view and bring this into the mill and that's press Z to enable wireframe mode now you may notice that you'll see these little black dots and those ones actually defining the faces so if you select an area that's what I'll control and draw like a little marquee if you're not selecting any dot you're not selecting a face but the moment you are selecting this dot and you're kind of dragging around it you will have that face selected so what I want to do is essentially want to select all of these little dark edges on the outside because those ones are actually the rims that are overlapping each other if you were to look top down so let's come out just a little bit maybe just a little bit more so I can actually select these as well and the ones at the bottom and this is a little bit fiddly as probably not the best but I'm going to press B for the marquee selection tool and then something click and drag and I want to make sure that I kind of get all of these faces selected let's check this out and that actually looks alright so I think I've got that side selected let's again return to top view by pressing seven let's repeat the process for the left side press B for the marquee selection tool and let's just drag around the side here just over all of the dark faces on the left hand side and let go yep that's though as well again for seven to go into top few let's do the bottom yep that's not too bad press seven and again this might be a little bit trial and error and there's different ways of selecting everything but essentially you just want to make sure that I've selected all of the edges along the outside all of those details that I want to assign that metal material to cool that's not actually looking to that and I'll just want to select these corners as well as these middle strips here and for that again let's go into top view by pressing seven and was still an orthographic view which obviously is perspective less or just kind of flat view it's gonna zoom in on the corners here and again I want to select all of these dark faces because those are the ones that are overlapping if you were to look top down and for that let's hold down control let's drag around all of these dots here that define the faces that we want to select so maybe I'll get that one as well let me check this out in a bit so that's not too bad come over to the other side let's repeat the process control and let's drag around all of these faces and finally let's just drag a marquee selection around this middle strip here that defines the center metal beam that goes around the treasure chest let's kind of go out a little bit proceed to exit our wireframe mode and let's press v to return to perspective view so this looks a little bit more normal again cool so I've got a few faces selected that I don't really want to have a metal material so I'm just going to slowly rotate around my cube this shift and select all of the faces that I don't want to be included so yeah just take a little time just customize this in any way that you want now the last thing I want to do is I want to select this little rim up here on the top of my chest for that lets press 1 to go to side view press 5 to go to orthographic view zoom in a little bit and again press Z for wireframe otherwise we're only going to be selecting the visible faces press B and Mark you select just the ones at the very top just a little rim on the outside 5 to go back into perspective Z to go out of wireframe so now that actually looks pretty good let's come over into our material tab select the metal material slot and let's press assign and there you go we now have this metal material assigned to all of the details on the outside of our treasure chest let's repeat the process for the lid of our trunk so let's exit edit mode by pressing tab and to unhide the lid simply press Alt + H and there's outlet and I'm not quite sure why we have this cube here suppose go to press X and delete it this time select the body of the trunk I press H to hide that let's select the lid and press tab to go into edit mode and we still get all of the vertex normals displayed so we can just press n to bring up this properties panel down here at the bottom let's disable the displaying off the normals because it was going to be a little bit in the way press M to hide the panel again and let's just drag the render view over a little bit and zoom out a little just so we could see enough of it but we still have plenty of space to work with our 3d mesh next press 1 to go into side view five for orthographic let's zoom in just a little bit and let's press Z to enable wireframe mode and let's just draw a selection around these dark edges just around this rim again which represents all of these detailed metal loops that we have on the outside of our lid so hold down ctrl and let's just drag around all of these ones here and I'm just making sure that the point stem cells which are the selectors for the faces or the center points for those faces are kind of within my selection and I'm actually going to go on the outside and just around with all of those faces hopefully selected let's let go it's looking all right here press 5 on the numpad to return to perspective view and let's rotate around and check this out and I think I've got everything that I wanted press Z to exit wireframe mode and that's looking pretty good over on the right-hand side in the materials tab right now we only have a single material slot for our lid so in order to assign a second material to it we need to create a second slot for that come over to the right hand side and press the plus to create a new material slot now we could create a new material if you wanted this one to look different like B golden or brass colored or anything else that you want but I'm just going to reuse my metal material so let's come to the left side to this material selector click and it doesn't actually make cents because I only have three materials but you can actually filter this list by typing out metal for example and this is why it's useful to really give you materials useful names so in a scene with a lot of materials you can easily find the ones that you're looking for something's going to select this metal material to assign it into my material slot and again on the left hand side in this rendered view you can see we haven't assigned it just yet so with the metal material selected let's press a sign to assign it to all of the faces we've got currently selected so let's press that and now we have this metal material also assigned to all of the details on the lid of our trunk let's exit out of edit mode by pressing tap old and haitch to unhide the body of our trunk let me make my rendered view plenty big again because this is really what we want to see and it actually looks pretty good yes there's still so much more to do to make this look a whole lot better especially the wood material really could use a texture map or a procedurally generated wood texture but that's going to lead us into the noddle workflow and work with the node editor and as I said I'm going to cover that in a future tutorial I hope that in this video I managed to cover the fundamentals for how to work with materials in blender and you know much more comfortable creating customizing and assigning those materials to your model to take it from super bland to slightly less bland and that's all this to it I really hope you enjoyed this tutorial if you did I would greatly appreciate it if you could give it a thumbs up favourite it and share it with the world if you do want to see some cool filmmaking the visual effects and 3d to Charles just like this one and you need here please consider subscribing and as always if you do have any comments questions or suggestions just leave them down in the section below thank you very much for watching and until next time I will see you later [Music] you

Channel: Surfaced Studio

Views: 139,442

Keywords: blender, tutorial, beginner, materials, texture, color, diffuse shader, glossy shader, 3d model, free, basics, 3d, introduction, interface, entry level, film making, how to, guide, rendering, cycles render engine, blender render, surfaced studio, help

Id: Oko7kas-fu4

Length: 28min 52sec (1732 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 04 2017