Nodes 4 Noobs | Lvl 1 | Beginners Guide to Nodes | Blender 2.8

hello and welcome to gaba media I'm grant Abbott and today we're looking at nodes so this will be the beginning of a large series hopefully by the end of the series you'll have the ability to create fairly complex materials this is a beginners course so there were lots of challenges throughout so try and follow along because that will help cement your learning and I'll be pausing the video so you can have a go with these things I'm expecting some understanding of the interface so do make sure you've checked out my beginner courses all the playlists are in the description if that's not detailed enough there's a really good paid for course from CG boost which is really detailed and in-depth and I can thoroughly recommend it again links in the description and before doing these exercises I thoroughly recommend that you look at my introduction to materials and shaders which is just the theory behind basic texturing for film and games lastly you can visit my website where I try and put all these different courses in order okay so let's begin so at the moment I'm using 2.82 and the best place to start is probably the shading tab over here when I click on the shading tab we see the node editor in the bottom and our viewport at the top and it should switch to look dev mode up in the corner here if you're in solid mode you won't see the results of your shading you must be in luck their mode or rendered mode which gives you the results of your lights as well and no background distractions we're going to stick with look dev mode one of the reasons for this is that it has an HDR eye in the background already set up for us we can use the scene lights as well and we can use the scene world but that means we need to set up our own HDR I so I'll uncheck that and I'll leave everything as the default you can here rotate the background HDR on you can probably see some slight change in my cube as the HDR image is lighting different parts of our scene so this is acting like a big surrounding light source shining lights and reflections onto our object and using an HDR eye gives a nice realistic look because in our world in environments we don't generally have just one light source like this so if I click on the cube you can see the basic material of that cube here you can also see it over in the material properties tab over here this is giving us all the information of our principle psdf shader which is just here and this can look a bit daunting for beginners so we will start at a sim a point to make things easier to understand now in any view you can press control space bar and that will maximize that view there's a back to previous button here or control space bar will take you back to your previous workspace settings for now I'm going to maximize the view with control space bar and just explain a tiny bit about nodes when you're in this view you can use the period key on your numpad to zoom in on a node so if I move these away and press period key it zooms in on the node I've got selected you can also press the HOME key to frame all your nodes so if you ever get lost and can't find things press the home button and all frame everything for you so how the nodes work the best way to understand it is that nodes go from left to right so the principal shader is going into the material output so it's starting here and finishing here I don't know personally of any situations where you don't finish with a material output so this is always your end point so nodes are these big objects you can see here you can add new nodes by going shift a to add and there's lots of nodes you can add here or go to the add menu up here I'll add another shader just to show that happening so let's add the diffuse and now we have another node above our principled psdf node the way we hook nodes together is with things called noodles so these lines here and I can change from the principle be SDF to the diffuse by hooking up this node to the surface output I'll press control space to go back and you can see the difference that's having which is hardly anything but if I click on this white box where it says base color and change the color to red we can now see the cube becomes red and back to white when I hook up the diffuse I can change these boxes by hovering over where they meet my cursor changes and then I can left-click and drag to move them around and we can have a bit more space for the shader editor so that's one of the first things we can try together is bringing in lots of different shaders and plugging them into the surface and seeing what they do so shift day to add and there's shader just there let's add something like the glass shift a shader emission shift a shader glossy and we've got our principal psdf there which is shift a shader principal psdf and just see what happens to your object when you hook these up so there's the glass there's the emission and there's the glassy so just quickly have an experiment and see what those different things do the next thing you can try is changing some of the sliders so here's the roughness for the glassy the less rough it is the more shininess and therefore it's reflecting our HDRI so pause the video and have a quick go at that now it's probably nice to put our Cube onto a floor so I'm going to press shift day to add a plane scale it up slightly and G said minus one that will put it underneath the cube now you'll notice immediately that my nodes have disappeared that's because I've got a new object and therefore I need to set up a new material for it so if I click on the cube at the moment you can see that the materials and nodes we've got are here still but if I click on the plane they all disappear so the cube has a different material called material I'm going to rename this cube material for now and the plane has no material and you can create a new material here or you can go to the down arrow and choose a material that you've already made I'm going to create a new one and I'll call this floor and we'll just change the base color here so now when I click on my cube I've got cue material there and I can change this around and if I click on my floor I've got my floor material here and I can change this around now one thing that people may find difficult if I add a new object again so shift data add mesh UV sphere and let's just grab that shift set so I'm not grabbing it in the z-axis I'm moving it across the floor over here I'm going to share this material with the cube so with this down arrow here instead of pressing new I click on that and choose cube material now when I change this material so let's change the color of the diffuse here to a yellow both of them have changed that's because they are sharing that cube material here and lots of beginners find this very tricky and difficult to understand but think of these materials like paint buckets and both of these materials are painted with that same paint bucket if we want a new material for our sphere we can click on it and we can do one of two things we can create a new material just here and that will create a new material but based on this one or we can just delete it here which is the cross button here and create a new material I'll call this sphere and then I can change the color of this one to a blue let's say so I'm going to click on our cube again and go back to our shaders here now you may have noticed if I hook up my glass material to the surface output that it goes all shiny but it's not see-through now this is something to do with the way Eevee renders things if I go to the render tab over here we've got the render engine as Evie if I put it two cycles now nothing will happen because the look dev mode uses Evie but if I go to the rendered mode we can see lots changes the glass material looks a lot more like glass now we've got some shadows in our scene from our light which is just up here and our objects are starting to look a lot more realistic now cycles does have some limitations if I move around you can see that it takes a time to update over in the side here and it's got this sort of graininess to it we call these white dots fireflies and we call the rest noise two quick tips you can speed up cycles by changing to your GPU so I'm going to do that now and you can see it going much far when I move around you will need to go to edit preferences system an under CUDA you need to make sure your graphics card is enabled if you don't see your graphics card then it may be that it's not compatible you can then close that down and you should then be able to see your graphics card over here the one other thing that can make this look a bit nicer is putting up the samples so under sampling you can see when I put this up it starts to become cleaner but it does take a bit more time now to render so it's important to understand that some of these different nodes will react differently in cycles to how they will in Eevee the reason for this is that Eevee tries to be an instant renderer and cycles tries to be a more realistic renderer using ray tracing and light bounces whereas Eevee fakes those things so if I go back to Eevee now by going to look dev mode so I can still have the render engine as cycles and I can perhaps use that as my final output but do all my work in Eevee which is the same as look dev mode I can start doing all my editing in real time and not have any of that noise and problems when moving around my viewport especially when it gets a bit more complicated inside Eevee the problem you'll have later on in a series is that some things aren't compatible with Eevee so you'll notice that things like glass and emission don't work particularly well in Eevee and we'll get into the crux of making them work later on so I'm going to delete the glass the emission and the glossy for now you'll notice it's all gone black because we've still got the material output there but we've got nothing plugged in to tell it how to react to light so a plugin the principle shader now the main thing you need to know about the principal shader for now is that the base color will change your color and that's the primary thing to learn is there's your base color the secondary thing to learn is the roughness so that's the shininess as you can see it's going glossy looking there if I move around or the roughness if we put it all the way up and you can see it's all rough now now these funds have changed a lot of these different things and mess about I would certainly encourage you to do that but the main things to change are the base color and the roughness the one other thing that's really good fun to change is the metallic so if I put this all the way up to one you can't see much difference at the mo this goes darker but if I make this shiny you can see it was fully reflective now if I bring the metallic down you can see it's got that sort of plasticky look and then up a shiny metal look generally speaking this should be at 0 or 1 things that either metallic or not but the thing you'll want to use as a slider is the roughness channel okay so it's time for your first challenge you'll need a floor and three different UV spheres so I'll delete the cube I'll click on the UV sphere that we've already got made and duplicated so shift D and then shift Z to keep it on the floor so it doesn't move in the z-axis and shift thee and shift said to move it over to the other side I right click and shade smooth on each of these so select them right click shade smooth so they're nice and smooth and remember that they all share the same material at the moment so your challenge is to make a gold sphere a silver sphere and a shiny plastic sphere now a quick tip to help you remember how to do that remember you can create new materials up here and each of your balls will need to have a different material at the moment they're sharing the sphere material so have a go at that ok so here's how I did it let's click on the first sphere and this will be our gold material now let's change the color then to a Goldy color somewhere around here and all my spheres are changing so obviously I'm going to have to create new textures for each of these but I'll continue with this one for now now let's turn the metallic all the way up because gold is metallic and let's make it a bit shinier so bring down the roughness so it becomes more glossy and there we've got a rough sort of gold looking material if I click on the color again I could make the material slightly darker to give it a more sort of rich gold look or lighter over at the side here ok so let's click on our next sphere and this one needs to be silver so if I start changing this now and try and make it silver it's changing all of them so I'll click away and undo that with control Z I need to create a new material now remember I can either press this button here to create a new material based on this one here already or delete this material and create a new one I'll do it that way this time and do it the other way for the next one so I'll delete this material it goes well white create a new material and I'll change this to silver so changing the color bringing the roughness down but it looks all plasticy that's because I haven't brought my metallic up and now is starting to look more like silver and I can change the roughness of that silver as you can see there okay so for the last sphere I said I was going to do it the other way so here's the new material and when I click on this it doesn't look like anything's changed but it's called this sphere zero zero one so this one has spherical so it's copied the material but it's created a new one that's really important now if I change the metallic all the way down to zero we can see it's got that sort of plasticky look and we can change the color here by moving it maybe to the purple and changing the tone of the color over here okay so now to render our image we can look through our camera with zero on the numpad and there's my camera I can press n on my keyboard to get up this panel and go to view lock camera to view to move my camera into position so I can see all the spheres now at this point if I press render it will use cycles so it's probably good idea to press on the render tab to see what that's actually going to look like now it's looking nice and realistic we've got some shadows in there and we can see the objects in the reflections but we can't see the world in the reflections and that's because we haven't yet set up an HDR eye and that's what Evie has by default if I go to Evie we can see our HDR there the scene looks much brighter and we've got some reflections in here of that background but in cycles we need to set that up what we'll need to do is add an image to our background will be adding images in the next episode but for now we can change this background from this gray color to a different color by going across to the object mode here and going to the world workspace now we can see our background there which is gray going into the world output so it's very similar and it's got two nodes just like our material set up and we can change the color of the background just here and I think it looks a lot better if we make a bit brighter we can then change the colors and you can see how those colors are actually affecting the colors within the scene to this color of light actually influences our scene so we might have a nighttime look for example you can also change the strength which is the amount of light given off by the background okay so in the next episode we'll be talking about how you can add images to your objects and images to your backgrounds thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 388,203

Keywords: understand, texture, paint, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, game, material, guide, easy, painting, how to, nodes, materials, textures, shader editor, creating materials in blender, blender 2.8, blender tutorial, blender foundation, 3d modeling, blender 2.8 tutorial

Id: moKFSMJwpmE

Length: 15min 26sec (926 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 10 2020