Part 2, Level 2: Random Materials - Blender Beginner Tutorial

this tutorial series is brought to you by polygon make better renders foster welcome back we have sprinkles but they well they look more like tic tacs they're all the same color and what's the fun of sprinkles if they're not different colors so let's change the color so the color of the sprinkle is defined by the material of the single sprinkle that it is referencing so that is the object mode yeah this little guy right here so if we went you know to the material panel and then we added a new material and you know looking at our donut here you can see if we made these blue then hey look at that we have blue sprinkles but that's not gonna help us because they're all the same color now you know we could duplicate this and make like a whole bunch of different ones with different colors and that was actually the way I did the first tutorial three years ago because I actually thought that that was easier for people to follow but the best way to actually create a randomized color set on your sprinkles like this is to actually do something with the material nodes and get a little bit fancy so let's at the top here along the top bar you've got an option which we haven't clicked on yet called shading okay so shading mode is I mean by the way these modes they're just like screen layouts like these layouts and then it'll put you into a specific type of like this is just the 3d view but it's put you into look dev mode up here but you could go into like you know rendered mode etc and then this thing down here this is nodes the node viewer for materials right so this is you could find that in shader editor and then you've got object etc anyway make sure you've got the the sprinkles selected the one that is blue right and what we want to do is we want to add in a control which will make it so that yeah this color here this blue color is randomized depending on which particle it is so this by the way all these settings you see here the reason they might look familiar is that they are the exact same settings that you see over in the right hand side this right hand side this bar here with with all the settings it's just like an easier way to access it to change these settings but if you need to get advanced that's when you jump over to the node view which is where we are right now which is yeah we're gonna do some fancy stuff so this base color right so we could we could put anything in here you could put an image texture in here you could do everything the one that we're looking for is a node by the way I'm hitting shift a and the node on the input that I'm looking for is called object info so I'm going to drag this in and we've got a number of values here so the way noes work is essentially if I take like one of these for example and I was to put this over here it would you know depending on what this node here actually does it would take that values it's like yeah it's like mathematics it's like taking this value and or programming referencing this value in another place if I was to take the random value and I was to put that into the base color you can see that this happens all the colors all the sprinkles are now black and white and various shades in between it so this object info node this random output of that is is basically every time the object is repeated or duplicated or referenced it's giving it a random value between zero and one right anywhere along there it could be like one of them is like point three to five point six nine threes whatever and depending on where it is along that it's by default it's giving it a white value or sorry a black value and a white value and it's just basically yeah it's like a gradient between them so each of these are matching that and that's well and good if you want sprinkles that look like somebody's dead relatives ashes sprinkled on the top but what we want is something a little more lively so what we can do between here so where it takes the random value and it's zero to one is we can put in shift a converter color ramp so if we can drop in this color ramp here and put this in here nothing will have changed at the moment but what this is doing is it's taking the zero to one and it's now transforming that across this gradient and this gradient here can be whatever colors or whatever look we actually want so if I made this black value here and I change this to be orange you can see that we have this so as you can guess the next step is is like how do you want your sprinkles to look and then how do you want to set this up so in my case I'm gonna go with a sort of a pastel themed color scheme and I'm gonna go with like five different sprinkled color sets so let's go like a blue color like this and then I'm gonna go a purple color and then I'm gonna go a hot pink color and by the way this is all referencing like stuff that I found on the the World Wide Web I've got a Pinterest board actually I'll put the link in the description but I've found like some like Donuts sprinkle looks that I like and and I decided to copy kind of like the yeah the color scheme but anyway it's basically what I'm doing now so let's add another one I'm gonna make this one yellow and then the last one is gonna be white okay great so look at that we now have looking at our donut we had those sprinkles whoops hell gosh what do they don't we have those sprinkles and they all have those colors now one problem and that is that it hasn't just assigned at these colors it's also assigned at every value in between it so it's also giving us a value like somewhere between pink and yellow like some of these sprinkles are gonna be that color and that's because this is a gradient and there's values in between it so what we want to do is we want to change the gradient type to instead of being linear we want it to be a constant into interpolation so if I said that now you can see that there is only it's basically now binary right it's either on or it's off it's not a value in between it and that's perfect that is exactly what we want so you can see that it the way it works is it's like the every the distance after the marker in between that and the next market is that color so this white value currently has no Contribution so I just gotta move these along a little bit like so like that and you can also see very quickly like you can change the color scheme of yellow sprinkles if you want more yellow ones or more hot pink ones or whatever it's just a really it's an easy way to actually like change the color scheme of the sprinkles it's a it's kind of cool once you once you set this up like I didn't want to do this for like my tutorial three years ago cuz I was like I don't know you're like nodes and random settings in color amp it's too advanced but then the feedback I got from that tutorial when I did a survey it was like everyone's like why didn't you use the random random set with color ramp and I'm like how did you even know that was the thing I thought that was too advanced but anyways so there we go we now have different colors yeah across the whole thing you'll notice we've only put this into the base color because everything else like the roughness and all that kind of thing that's they're gonna be the same like those values across sprinkles they're not gonna change it's really just the colors of the sprinkles speaking of which by the way we should probably increase the roughness of the sprinkles so that they're a little bit more more like chalk looking because that's kind of what a lot of sprinkles look like this is a some that are shiny so it's really up to you if you want to go for a shiny sprinkle or a chocolate looking sprinkle but but that's that's gonna do it for that alright now let's just jump into the next part of the sprinkles which is you can see the end the next problem is that they are all the exact same size right and obviously sprinkles being sprinkles no two sprinkles are the same right it's they're all unique they're all special snowflakes some of them are a little bit bendy some of them like short and fat and some of them are like like almost nothing there so that's what we want to create now as I mentioned there is you know we can't use that scale randomness value crap I just lost it oh that's what happens when you use a version of blender which is experimental it crashed on me so that was fun so let me pause the recording while I redo all that yay okay so as I was saying now that I've caught up and read down everything we can't change this scale randomness value I'm really playing with fire the exact same thing that made it crash because it changes the the thickness of the sprinkles and that's not good so really what we really what we want is we want to have these sprinkles that just have like different heights to them right so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take my sprinkle here and I am in layout edit object mode whatever and I'm gonna duplicate it and this is going to be another sprinkle and I'm gonna go into toggle x-ray mode so that I can select the whole thing and I'm gonna make this one twice as long like so okay now when you do this you come back to your you're done and over here and nothing has changed and the reason some of you probably figured out it's quite obvious is that it's still referencing the original object it's still referencing this single object here but you can choose to instead of rendering just a single object you can reference an entire collection of objects and that is what we're gonna do so I'm gonna select my first of all let's give this a name so I'm gonna hit f2 and I will call this sprinkle short and I'll call this sprinkle long okay and then I'm selecting both of them and I'm gonna move it to a brand new collection and we'll call it what are we gonna call it we're gonna call it sprinkles oh really really hard to know what's gonna happen next so down here collections instance collections sprinkles and there we go so now it's randomly basically pulling from one of those two things and the cool thing is is that now we can have as many different types of sprinkles as we want because there's not just short ones and long ones but there's also oh there's also medium ones all exciting we've got we've got a medium one we've also got we also got some bendy ones so let's oh no is it can crash I think it's gonna crash it's gonna crash it's crashed let's do that again all right we're back yes some people would just remove that from the tutorial the pause effect crashes but I think it's a valuable and always save also III will say that I'm using an experimental build it's very rare for blender to crash this often anyways as I was saying there are some bendy ones so I'm gonna duplicate this guy and I am going to yeah create like some bendy pots so I'm just like oh I should definitely explain what I just did that right so control ah is gonna allow us to create a loop cut right control R and and then when you click sorry first of all you get that like outline that yellow outline which shows you where the loop is going to go that's basically adding detail essentially that's what a the best form of the loop is and then if I use scroll wheel I can increase the number of loops alright so this is just like some very basic modeling here so I just scrolled it up to give me like two loops and then I just click and then it'll ask you where do you want to place them and if you just right click it'll just place them right in the default middle area and then I've got you know a bendy bendy sprinkle looking thing right and then I'll do the same thing I'll duplicate my medium one here as well I'm gonna save as I go very important the other thing you can do by the way is just like extrude up and every time you extrude it it's gonna create one of those loop cuts it's the exact same way of doing the exact same thing it's just different ways of doing it essentially that's actually kind of like a little bit too wormy looking right yeah it's kind of cool and my apologies but this this add-on and all the crash isn't everything but sometimes I'm showing you what I'm pushing and other times I'm not and my apologies but that's yeah we got up we gotta fix that out on it's really bugging me actually it just turns itself off randomly anyways look at this we've got all these little squiggly lumps and stuff all over it one thing to note as well is like some of them are like really sticking out there and part of the reason for this is that I got it turn on but my origin points will actually show you here the origin put that little dot there is the point at which it is attaching itself to the top of the Ising there so that being where it is it's probably not in the best place it should probably be in the middle of it and you can see that all of them have problems with that so if I right-click after selecting all of them and then I select set origin origin to geometry it's gonna basically place it in the center of all of those objects and now when we come back you should see it's a little bit more improved than it is one big problem a lot of people had with the previous tutorial was that you've got intersection right particles that are intersecting all the particles and unfortunately there is just no good way to fix that the particle system in blender is it's a little it's a little old and it just doesn't have this ability yet you really want to be able to like read the shape of a mesh and then detect when meshes are intersecting it should be able to do that but the current version doesn't do it I think the plan is for two point eight three or two point eight for something like that they're gonna roll in particle nodes which should hopefully have this feature and a lot more other things but for now really my best advice is if you see things that are intersecting and you're not happy with how it looks you can change the seed here the seed is just like a random value like every new seed will be a different mix a different version of it so I find just finest seed that looks the best and this will come like doing it now it's kind of a little bit pre-emptive because when it comes to rendering that's really when you want to check like the intersection of things and choose your seed value but I just want to give that a heads up because I know a lot of people have that question of like how do I fix it it looks terrible so anyway now the other thing I want to do is I want to add just a few spheres to it because whilst looking at all the different sprinkles there I noticed that it's quite a common trend to have these little bowls like almost like marbles like it just looks marbles sometimes they like star-shaped love love heart-shaped just kind of like that I don't know what you call it like that like old pastel like old-fashioned candy that's just like Oh like crushed up kind of thing like you could do a lot of really cool stuff with sprinkles but anyways I'm just I just want to add some bowls so funny balls I am going to right here inside my sprinkles collection I'm gonna add a new UV sphere and of course it's gonna be way too big and way too high res so I want it to be higher res probably then the the sprinkles because it's gonna be a little bit bigger but not too high res so something like that and then I'll turn down the size to be say 5 millimeters no too big let's go 3 something like that that's actually now maybe 4 okay and then I'm gonna right click that and shade smooth so that it is smooth and it's not using the current material over here which is good because I actually just want to make it one single color so very simple new material and the color is just gonna be like a blue like a saturated a little bit more saturated aqua color and it's actually quite shiny like the roughness would be quite low on this so and I think the reason that this has become popular in decorating and everything is the same reason that and we'll get to this it's the same reason that like it's just it's actually our aesthetic artist it's like there's a technique which I'm still trying to learn myself but it's like you don't want to have just like repetitive uniform detail everywhere because it just looks predictable and it just looks flat and boring and dull if you can have like big elements medium sized elements and then small elements that are placed in like kind of chaotic areas it can look more interesting so I believe that's the purpose of having this on cakes and it works but not right now it looks like it's been invaded by some I don't know nano particles or something so the problem is that it is applying it's picking from our sprinkles collection here it's picking them evenly right it's just plucking them from this collection and they all have the same kind of relative important or priority but there is a setting here called the use count and if you enable this in the drop down you will see that you get a count value next to each of your sprinkle names now there's no way to say like reduce the importance of this but you can increase the importance of everything else so essentially for everything other than the sphere I want to increase the amounts of them so for the would say like medium sprinkles I'll go 60 60 the long ones you can also like tweak it because now like there's probably like longer strength longer sprinkles are probably less common than the medium ones same with the short ones like that would be less common than the medium ones as well most of them would be medium and then some of these long ones as well and then finally just the sphere you can see that we've now got like just three spheres left because of the importance of them being so small and that's basically it let's just cycle through this a little bit what are the segments seed here every time we do a new seed like you might get like three or four or something like that appear on it in fact I might actually just increase these I think the spheres are just a little bit too under played right now go to spheres ah I know gone too much I don't know you can play with this yourself and just as I said you know make the make the sprinkles that you want to see be the sprinkles that you want to see in the world alright let's bring back the environment let's just see how that looks there you go guys that's the sprinkles the amount of sprinkles that's probably the other really big one is the number on top there and there's no right and wrong answer it's really like some some donuts have like a few sprinkles and they're like like really big and like chunky right well not that chunky but like slugs but that's one aesthetic or you can go like the other direction and go like loads of sprinkles and then maybe make them a little bit smaller or something like that not that small you gotta you gotta find the right value but play with it and just you know this is where you can get to be creative and artistic and find a look that you like and choose the colors you like and all that kind of thing it's it's a lot of fun so go ahead and join me in the next video because we have finished the sprinkles so join me there

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 1,357,032

Keywords: blender, tutorial

Id: aZ5ungDgFNc

Length: 20min 0sec (1200 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 11 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/rapierarch]

Mouse scroll wheel or from the action menu at the left bottom corner.

watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pCf3DjsEBg

I also recommend to watch the whole blender fundamentals playlist from blender.org (this is a part of it)

[u/sumofsines]

Loop cuts only work on quads. The instance a loop cut hits a face with fewer or more than 4 vertices, it will stop.

[u/Uncle_Slippy_Fist]

Image here:https://imgur.com/a/N1au8iY