MtoA 207 - Rock Shader - Material Study

hello everyone and welcome back to my channel in today's video m2a 207 I will be talking about how to create a rock or sand shader it's pretty much like a more like a dusty rock shader as you can see in the reference images I have here so I will be showing you how to do that you might wonder why 207 because my last tutorial was actually 528 as you can see on my youtube channel the reason for this is my material series which I have started a long while ago actually started with 200 so 201 was my first material series I started and I will be just continuing that trend so you know it's a material series or a material study so we'll it will always be at 201 or 203 or 207 number my most recent one was about snow and ice which is this tutorial here which which gained some traction on social media pretty recently and we will be using pretty much the same principles we will use a base displacement to to get the rough shape and then we just be adding a more and more detail to this so as you can or as you can prepare yourself we'll be using these kind of techniques also I am on Instagram I have my account here you can see my profile name I'll be posting social stuff like pictures of dogs for instance but also there's like occasionally a 3d renders I will do some pictures with my nikon z6 and just yeah if you want to follow me there I'm also posting stories digital assets and my main thing is I have my patron channel where I am hosting some support some quick chats maybe some one-on-one help some mentoring and obviously I you will also gain access to all the tutorials source files starting from m2 a 501 and and recent based on time so obviously you will get also the source files for this tutorial on there so I also have the mentorship privat-dozent thing so if you want if you need some specific help we can work on something together and I can help you with very isolated things for look there and lighting and obviously my Twitter account where I follow people post interesting things and I do posting through the posting of my stuff as you can see here I posted my work in progress of the same tutorial I'm working on right now so Before we jump into this I just want to say that if you like what I do please help me out on YouTube subscribe to my channel and obviously give me a thumbs up for this video which just shows me that you enjoy the content I am providing for free for you so let's jump into my eye I will keep saving quite often as you know I'm working with live displacement shaders here and you never know what is going on so let's just have a quick look on the reference so the main shape the base ships what I want to create now is these broader strokes on on the object you can see we have some kind of wavy pattern and it's just a bit not it's not perfectly round so I just want to set this quickly up for you I just make this guy straight like this and let's just hook this up so the first thing what I want to do is just create a noise pattern ai noise like this and then we have the life when you're going let's just stop this for a minute and just create our displacement shader like that delete the shading engine and hope these guys up so we want the red into the displacement and then the out of that will go into my shading engine let's change the render debug shader to basic and hit render takes a bit of time to subdivide but once that is up and running we should see something being displaced here so let's see there we go so this is now my displaced sphere which is obviously way too dense in terms of the displacement map and I think before we get into final renders I just want to adjust my displacement to be off because the mesh itself is subdivided quite a lot so I just want to don't waste your time and waiting for subdivisions to happen so I want to introduce those rough shapes and we want to use it with a little bit of detail not too much and we and a bit of distortion which is just kind of breaking up the default patterns of a of a noise pattern you can see that a scale of one gives us this high frequency so I just want to reduce that to maybe 0.1 and let's see what that brings us if I start to render now again it should be a bit faster to start up because we do not subdivide and you can already see now that is definitely broken up we can see now we get these wavy patterns these burger things are now here it's not that that pointy anymore now we have some issues with the mesh that's just because of the UVs but we will ignore this for now and we just care about the shape and I think the shape is pretty good it's nice and broken up and so the next step would be to add these bigger cracks and we want just stuff which goes inside and our default value for the displacement on default is zero which means a value of zero will do will not displace the object so I want to change this to go to 0.5 0.5 which means a gray value of 0.5 will not displace higher will extrude and lower will go inside the mesh so if I change this now the displacement map should change too and you can see now we we pushed everything in a bit so it's still a good effect we just got it to the original shape now which is perfect so the next thing what I want to do is I want to create these broader holes and breakups everywhere so I'll be just creating a new AI noise and we kind of know now that a scale of 1 gives us these kind of shapes and we pretty much want the same maybe not as small so maybe that's 2.2 instead like that and we want to introduce more detail to this so let's do octaves it's kind of like layers like the more detail and I can show that if I just hook this up to my ID slots which I just used for temporary isolate selected modes which do not work because I have the lock in the bottom let's try again there we go so this is now on 6 on 1 it's pretty deep lesson learn almost no detail and on six we have nice and nice details so what I want to do now I just want to multiply this map with our existing one with which looks like this so if I multiply every value which is darker pushes into the geometry but we now have also these grayscale values and I want to clamp them so if we multiply something with one you should know that nothing is happening so I want to create a few values which are clamped to one so I do not actually apply the displacement on those all right and I'll do that by connecting arrange and I enable smooth stepping which is the clamping and now what I want to do I just want to reduce the input max and reduce that number so now a value of 0.5 nine will be clamped to one and you can see at the bottom the values here these are now all clamp to one and we have a few ones which are lower than that and if we want to push this further we can just increase the input meant but I think for now we just leave it as it is and just hook this up with a a I composite or you can actually use an a I multiply because that's essentially what we want to do multiply two colors together multiply this with that and let's just actually before we plug this into the displacement let's have a look what that looks like so you can see a value of one because it was darker there before we are not touching this we are just multiplying these darker points there there and there so it's it's only in these locations where we are multiplying this so now let's hook up this to the displacement and see what that brings us it takes a bit of time it's receptive iding you can see something happen if I go back to the basic mode we can now see we have these nice little chunks being cut out cut out of the mesh and this is pretty much these kind of shapes which which I was trying to achieve like these kind of dents here and there and we still have these clean surfaces which are great because we also have on the reference if I find it do I find it is it not in here I might not have added this or is it just not there we have some kind of like little bulges everywhere see might have been actually this image yeah it might have been this image which was just flip so we we just see these broader little holes everywhere so what I want to do next is just introduce some kind of little bumps so the the straight surfaces here are not not so clean and what I want to do there is I can just multiply some kind of high frequency noise with everything again so we have a few multiplies here here and there and I'll just create a new ai noise like this and this should maybe stay on one with just a lot more detail to this maybe try eight and we will just be multiplying this let's do an AI multiply and we use the same technique we did before and let's just sample this region here and now let's hook this up to the displacement it should look super strong and wonky now like that so that's definitely way too much and the cool thing now is we can just because a value of 1 means nothing will happen we just have the control now to change our scale by just removing the blackness the darkness of that map so if I change the minimum value to maybe 0.6 oops didn't work as expected point 6 the spaceman will update now when we should see a less strong effect here and you can see now we get our almost straight surfaces back that just maybe go a bit higher 0.75 and now we should start seeing that it's it's almost clean again like all these flat surfaces are not that broken up anymore and we might still have some kind of modulation which is great so we see these the the great the greater shape we see these more detailed holds and all I'm missing now is these really these deep chunks of breakup and this is now what we will be creating we will be trying a few different things and this is mostly me playing around so we have an AI cell noise which is pretty cool if i hook this up into my d slots to use it for isolate selected and they have something like cells like this and you can see we almost have that shape it's just very sharp so what we can try and maybe look for this alligator at some details to this so we can actually try to use this instead because this is a bit more broken up and we can try to change the electro net like you narrow to you on this and now we can see we get some very interesting shapes it's not that sharp lines anymore we can I'm not sure if density works with this I don't think so but we can play around with the scale we can go maybe a bit lower like this so we have a bit larger chunks and now I can just hook up a range a range note and hook these guys up and now we can see if I play around with those values if we can isolate them a bit so it's not so uniform so let's just bring in some clamping here and this you can see this might actually work already obviously we need to invert this so whatever is white here should be black so we can just flip the input mins and maxes and now we see that we get some darker values everywhere and obviously you can play around and see if this is better so let's just use this and just multiply that again so whatever is white will not be touched and whatever it's darker and value will push stuff inside this is you should know by now that this is the kind of technique I'm using for this tutorial so now I have my multiply set up and let's just hook these into the displacement shader and see what we get now if I change the mode to basic again you can see now we get these little things pushing inside and this is totally what we see in here we just need a bit more sharper pushes or like detailed inside and what we can do we can mess around with the range a bit more let's just see this is now inverted so I think if we lower this we should see stronger dents let's see if this is true and yeah we definitely see stronger dents now so we have deeper holes and I think this is pretty much what I was going for one last thing though is let's just try to use the the regular cell noise with that heart hard-edged cells just because it has a nice little feature which elliegator one doesn't have which is the density so if I play with the density now you can see that we get these random patterns and it's not everywhere and the same if I go to 0.9 you can see now that we have a lot more white pieces than we have the darker ones and this is what I want to do or get so now you can see there's different depths as well because of the layers we used and if I use this to multiply we get we should also get some nice chunkiness going on but I want to arrange this again just to help with the control of this map and the randomization so if I now again as we did before I just reduce the output input max to a lower number enable clamping so everything which is black well obviously get obviously get pushed in but now I change my input max so now only these parts here get pushed in 0.3 only these little chunks will get pushed in and this is a pretty cool effect and you can see it's very close to what we see here on the left on the reference we can just force the values of a deeper point one maybe so this is now pushing very deep inside this may be 0.05 0.0025 yeah let's just try this and multiply that with our displacements so let's just try the basic mode again like that we have our range on the top let me do a multiply node like so we just hook these guys up and you should be very familiar with this process now how you can add detail with this kind of approach so let's just hook up the displacement and now we should see some deeper cracks going on let's see if that is the case it's actually hard to see and the shader but I think it's definitely there let's just change the mode to shade it and see how that looks okay I was expecting a few deeper holes actually but we can still see them they are definitely there and they might be just a bit too too strong but let's actually before we change anything let's just change the subject or there's actually just an able subdivision in general because we disabled that and let's just see how that looks all right I think this might just work it's maybe a bit too broken up here but let's just work with this so right now we have a pretty much I would say a working displacement map and we let's just jump over to the diffuse components how we can create a very interesting diffuse color for this kind of shader so on the base you can see that we have this kind of white color or like sandy color and we have saturated orange here there's some green and we have these black top lines so for diffuse I like to an AI layer rgba which is kind of a stack layer shader that just hooked this up to the base color and maybe connect a noise pattern to my input number one so you should see what's going on and if I know now enable isolate selected like that and make sure that I lock it to this RGB a node by clicking on the little lock icon in the bottom corner of the Arnold render view everything now which is connected to this node will get displayed as a texture directly in the viewport or in the Arnold render so as I said let's try to to get this color working the sandy color so my whites let's see if we can pick it should be something like this and typically these values are always a bit well a bit too too dark or too saturated so let's just make them slightly lighter and also change the scale so we want a pretty broad pattern like we had before maybe 0.1 like that and then we want to add details maybe six layers and I think this is works pretty well you can see these patches so let's just pick let's just pick this orange color and let's just make this darker maybe more like in kind of that sense the diffuser albedo is typically a lot darker than you would expect it to be the shader on the left or the reference I mean as is lit there's lots of light on it and it's reflecting as well so keep always keep that in mind you should not replicate exactly this color just because there are so many other influences on this which which might change the look and if I go to the basic mode or the shaded mode you can actually see how different it is and obviously we went a bit too far on the darkness so let's just get in the base colors using the shaded mode let's bring some saturation back maybe a bit lighter I think this works now pretty well for the light color we just need to change the saturation on the darker one which is a bit more orange yeah this is pretty good I'm just looking at this kind of spot here on the left and just to see this on the right and I think this is a pretty good estimate of what we see on the left so now if we change back to the isolate mode we we know now that this albedo is okay to work with it's not perfect but it's pretty pretty good so the next step would be to bring in these little green patches and I like to do that using another noise but this time that noise will be driven for the mix of that layer RGBA and I always like trying to create a range so let's just hook up the color add the noise to the input and then we open up this whole shader to show all attributes and then I want to connect the output of this range to my let's just think of it to the mix which is actually at the bottom here so we want to connect this to the mix number two so in here if I enable layer number two and I change the operation to under you can see now that we get this breakup going on and we want to use that to modulate to green so I need to change a scale again for the noise and we can try maybe point one again and let's just use a different offset so we just enter some kind of random values in here it's just an XYZ offset so we do not have the exact same values everywhere and so let's just adjust a range clamp it to a zero and one and maybe bring in some change the input mints who get some kind of clamping going on so we have these isolated spots and I think this might be a bit much so let's just push it further and change the the scaling of the offset a bit to look to something which works for you maybe something like that and now instead of just having a black color here let's just change the mode to maybe soft light and instead of having black let's just pick this kind of green color and change it until we are happy in the in the shaded mode let's just do this and it's actually pretty good already and we just might you go we just saturate this a bit greener maybe like that a bit darker more saturation it's almost like a fungus going on right so we have good yellow maybe we can even go a bit more in the blue and then desaturate I think this this pretty much works so now we have these green spots these guys and we also have these white white spots so let's just do the same pretty much the same workflow for this so we create a noise AI noise like that and we use the range so I always use ranges as you know by now it's just a lot easier to control any everything and we hook the output red to mix number three we change this mode instead of soft light we change this to multi add to screen and screen is kind of like a plus operation whatever is black will not get added whatever is white will get added so we can definitely choose the shape here or the detail so we can have seven layers we can change the scale to point to maybe we can offset this in any direction you want and then you use the range again to kind of push the details into one direction so it's more isolated maybe we want white spots there there and there you know that instead of just screening this on top I want to create another noise but this noise will go into the input so I create an AI noise and this as I said will go into the input of layer number three and now you can see we have some modulation going on it's not just a white anymore it's kind of a broken up white and if I add more detail you can see now this breaks up even further and I can now control this with the color here so if I put this to black it's pretty much often I can subtle fade it in until I'm happy let's see and shaded mode how this looks let's just bring this in and I think at the value like this is good so we see these white patches coming up pretty much there there and there which is a pretty good effect and before you continue on the diffuse side let's just push the roughness so let's go lower on this so it's a bit more shiny everywhere let's see how that looks and now we can see that there is some kind of Sheen going on and the shader definitely does not have it it's super rough so keep that in mind we can also bring up the diffuse component so the diffuses even a bit rougher as well maybe something like that maybe point one is better and then obviously we went too far with the roughness I think this is pretty good so we can see some kind of response on this and I think we might have gone a bit too far with with the black spots or the darker brownish tinge here so that's just lightened these guys up like that I think that's a lot better now and the next thing is maybe adding this kind of fate and this is like a pretty neat trick which I like to do in in shading and this is using the world position or the other object point position and use that too to mask out some kind of value so I will be creating a state vector which reads the geometry points and I can change the mode to P and I can connect a range again and I enable clamping and I hook up the out value of the state vector to the input of the range and I hooked this up to let's use in port number four and change the mode to under so now this is pretty much the effect which we see and if I view the green channel which is the y-axis red is X and blue is Z you can see at the bottom here let's just hide this at the bottom here you can see the values change and wait just say I'll take this so now that the top of my sphere you can see there's a value of 49 which is actually world units and then the further I go down and Y the value changes to 2-0 so I want to remember a value of 49 50 or something like that so if I enable clamp and I say choose input maxes maybe the value of 50 you should see that there's no a full of coming and obviously I want to also change the lower section so this would be I want to kind of a fall-off for the top section maybe 45 or a bit more something maybe like that and now I have my full of region for my mask and one last thing I want to do I I don't want to have a straight transition here so I want to create an AI noise on top of this which drives the input min so let's just hook this and put man like so and I just want to kind of input the same values for my color slot so I'm pushing the wrench back into this 45 region so I can go 45 here and maybe 42 here there I mean so I have 42 and 45 I think and now you can see we have these kind of noises going on here we can change the scale maybe to 0.4 like that and we can add some details some layering to break up the shape so now we have a nice little fall-off going on and we can totally use that now to drive the darker area on the top here so instead of using this as my color I want to use this as the mix as I did before so layer four mixes this which we actually want to green this time this is important to not use red because we want the green access the y-axis we need to hook up the green channel which is now you can see what's going on and instead of using the same map we just want to connect a noise to this one more time to the input here so now the noise is being displayed in that region and we want to kind of get this it's kind of like an iron iron corrosion so I'm just trying to pick that color something like that and the other one is maybe a darker reddish one just make this a bit darker maybe something like this for the top part and I just want to multiply this instead of using the under mode so looking for multiply you can see now we get this darkening effect and let's just change with the saturation on these guys so we get a bit more color back more purple and this one will be I guess more blue like that let's see how this looks in the shaded mode and we can see it's pretty close to what we have there if we just want to move that down a bit we wouldn't need to adjust the noise patterns from maybe just lower those values you can see now if I lower them everything moves down slightly you can see it's kind of now affecting it in the y-axis yeah and if if you feel that this is a bit too strong you can always adjust your lightness of this of the multiplications or just add another noise on top but I think this this dark section is actually pretty cool it looks pretty much like a Browning effect or like burnt burnt stone or something like that so the next thing would be to add some kind of dustiness to everything and I like to do that using a curvature and occlusion and first of all I want to use occlusion to actually darken these little holes and dents everywhere so I'm going back to my selected mode and I'll just create an ambient occlusion like this delete the shading engine which gets created and hook up the red channel to mix number five and I just want to enable this layer five make sure it's on and I just want to make sure we our mode is to multiply and we want to multiply with black and we just now need to adjust the occlusion so right now it's a far clip of 100 we just want to reduce that to maybe a unit of maybe two and we want to inverse the effect so whatever is what gets black and black gets to white and now we can see that whatever is in close contact gets these little nice darker outlines and this is pretty much all I wanted to do is just to darken these all these areas a bit so everything gets a bit more crunchy and more detailed and the other thing is I wanted to use curvature to to highlight a few of those edges so I'm just using the luminance red to mix number six and I just enable the layer six as well like that and change the mode to maybe screen let's see why we don't see anything is that correct I think we might need to change the color to white to see something and there we go changing this to white you can see what's happening all these edges get like an outline pretty much and we just want to adjust the effect of that curvature by adjusting the radius maybe 0.3 for this and we also want to add more samples maybe six to get more details and those curvatures and I just like the effect of this but this is definitely way too strong we just want to dial this down quite a bit so in the effect here in a layer we just reduced the color to maybe a half of this might be a gray let's see the shaded version how this looks if it's too weird no but I know I think it's good it's good so you can see that there's this that's kind of fading towards these edges of everything which adds a nice nice little touch I think does this might just work alright so and then last but not least I want to tweak the shader a bit and I like to get this this kind of powdery dusty look to everything so what I want to do here is to apply a sheen which is pretty much a velvety look to everything so in the Sheen tab I just want to increase the way to one so you can see what's going on it's kind of like a facing ratio based colorization and we just want a warm color let's just pick something in the ballpark of this reference here something like that and you can see just doing this helps quite a lot to sell the shader it's a bit too strong on on fully one so let's just dial this down maybe two to half and we should still see the same effect the same velvety look on the edges it just looked like let me show you before and after so this is now what we have if I would remove that you can see how dark everything gets so maybe a value of 0.25 is very good and gives us the effect we want and now what you what I want to do is actually introduce some subsurface scattering you might wonder why it's a rock it does not let light through but actually it does let light through it's not that not so much as a plastic or skin or wax but it will still let some light through so instead of using this color to for the base color I want to use this for my subsurface color instead and to make use of that you obviously wouldn't need to enable this by making sure that the subsurface weight is on one and now you can see everything that's actually very waxy and noise ear for sure you can see it's now cleaning up and you can see now it is totally not looking right anymore so what I want to do is change the type to random walk v2 and I want to change the scale to 0.05 maybe so it's almost a diffuse shader with a slight amount of scattering just on the edges and I want to use the same kind of sand color I used for the for my for the sheen so let's just choose some kind of warm color here make sure the value is on one and this would kind of be pretty much that effect for the scattering obviously it's hard to see it right now but once I do the full final render you can see that it's a lot softer and it's it's not too soft it's not like like plastic you still see it's it's super diffuse with the rock texture and everything but it just feels a bit more maybe organic is not the right word but a bit softer and it's it's almost as if you can touch it pretty much and that's the fact you should be tried trying to go for all right so what I also then like to do is introduce some depth of field this is just my my habit of doing for these kind of tutorials I just I have it set up already so all I need to do is actually go to render settings and take ignore depth of field and just by doing that you should see that these things are now out of focus I focus on D on this area here and not so much on this alright so let me just start the final render and see how our result looks like so how I like to do that is first go back to our shaded mode change the mode to be progressive refinement off like this go to our render settings do maybe two camera a and able adaptive sampling on eight and six five was pretty good and change our cores like that hit save and let's just start to render so what I want to explain again is that all this what I'm doing right now can obviously be done in a different software like substance designer or you can paint everything in Maori and stuff like that so this is totally an option for you to do and then the next question would be why am i doing this tutorial if you say why don't you do it in designer and the reason for me and doing a tutorial about this is just so you can learn how to actually work with shading networks how the logic is how everything works together especially using displacements which is a which can be very tricky if you do not know how they work and I think this tutorial should help you just to understand that if your 0 value is 0.5 that you need to multiply values to get holes in the objects or a + stuff to get to it to get some extrusions on top of that and the same for the colorization that i'm using the RGB layer stack and then stacking colors and blending them with reclusions or curvatures or noise patterns so pretty much all this you do not learn in substance designer and to be very proficient in other packages you need to know how shaders work and that is my main intention of doing these tutorials and I hope this makes sense and it's not like trying to put you off of anything but all-in-all I just want to show you guys techniques which are very important in this kind of industry it's not about creating the best renders it's how it's to know how to actually achieve them and everyone can say oh this shading ball looks so crappy and I can do it 10 times better once then I'm happy for you if you can do that but it's still a learning process and obviously I can also do much better than this but this is just showing you the workflows and the ideas I hope I'm being clear it's not to to demanding but this is just kind of my way of looking at things and I hope this helps you and if you enjoy what I do and is in sharing this knowledge I really appreciate if you like this video and subscribe to my channel because this means a lot to me and if you need more help feel free to join me on patreon and and couldn't contact me over there so we can get into a hangout or some kind of chat to help you out in a specific thing yeah and as you can see as a fat as the render is finishing up we can see some very nice details now I especially on this section in the front or we can see these bigger software holes and then we can also see this really crunchy edgy cuts in it and this is pretty much the cell noise multiplying with the alligator noise to get these patterns and what I like as well as these whiter things which we were using with the curvature I think it just feels like the shader is being lifted up or as if the paint or that the stone peels off slightly or some kind of modulation going on so let's just wait until the render finishes up all right so three minutes 26 seconds and the render is done I hope you can just ignore these black spots these are actually some bubbles within the geometry so just ignore those for now they shouldn't matter too much that just saved those render under my snapshot folder let's just see because I did a few tests and unfortunately the render I recorded the whole scene already and I didn't have my mic on so I talked for 40 minutes without recording my voice and I was really bummed out so this is now my third attempt at recording this so I hope this is good now and you can see this is my progress this was my initial test which I showed on my Twitter account these were the initial tests and adding more detail this was my second one which was actually the official tutorial where forgot to record my so it's kind of a bit different pattern but all in all it's the same idea and then we have the one we did right now so you can see they all look a bit different but they all use the same techniques so you can see that just by applying the same workflows you can get totally different looks which is not a bad thing and you can see that I think the last one now not this one like this we would eat together I think this one works very well in in terms of the reference it's not too far off obviously we can subdivide some more to get even more detail but all in all I think that the idea is the same so all these source files you will find on patreon if you want to follow along if you want to check out the sharing Network yourself or you will get access to all other source files as well and one last time if you enjoyed this please leave a thumbs up or leave a comment below or subscribe to my channel everything is really highly appreciated and you know how much time I spent on these videos so a little click on that like there is not not a big big as for me cool so thank you guys for watching and I will see you in the next tutorial

Channel: Arvid Schneider

Views: 21,540

Keywords: training, tutorial, learning, lesson, beginner, advanced, lookdev, lighting, shading, maya, arnold, rendering, procedural, material, series, study, rock, sand, rough, stone, arvid schneider, mtoa

Id: 2_930qbqWe4

Length: 43min 35sec (2615 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 31 2019