Practical Material Development in Blender

hello everyone and welcome i'm derek elliott from dirk.com and what i have for you today is a deep dive into the principled shader and all the cool things it does and things you can do with it in this video we're going to cover all sorts of things starting with some very basic principles all the way into some more complex procedural material creation and even some uv unwrapping because hey what's a cool product without a big fat logo slapped across it so while this was intended to be the materials follow up to my previous video where we modeled a shoe what it actually turned into was something a little more in-depth this video has applications far beyond simply texturing a shoe so if you're interested in product design or concept development within blender then this video is going to give you the biggest bag of tips and tricks compared to any of my previous videos if you are interested in following along directly with my process for building out the materials just like i created in my instagram series of shoes then you're also in luck because there's a separate video covering just that which is really what i'll call the true shoe tutorial part two and without further ado don't step in the poo it'll make sense in a minute alright so before we get started i just want to show you one of our really cool materials we're going to be making today you can see there's a lot of interesting textures going on like that some roughness variation we've got some bump mapping all sorts of cool things you can see we've got the logo on the strap right there very cool i'm just kidding i know you all can't see anything and that's because today's lesson number one is going to be that your materials are nothing without lighting there is no lighting in the scene so you can't even see that this cool material i got built out is actually just making a poop shoe sorry about that didn't mean to start things off today with the poop shoe but just wanted to prove a point and uh launch us into the first part of the tutorial which is going to be getting our interface set up in a way so that we can see our materials make sure that they're not poop and uh just get things going with a nice uh nice sorry about that first part but uh here we are in our shoe model scene where we kind of left off the last tutorial now if you're wondering where to get the shoe model or you don't have a shoe model this is sort of part two of my shoe tutorial where we're going to be texturing this shoe feel free to use any model you like though it doesn't have to be a shoe i want this to be a pretty general material creation tutorial a little more geared towards product design product development type stuff but yeah i'm in my scene here now what i want to do is get the interface set up in a way that we can start building out some materials and at least for the first portion of this i'm not going to be building the materials one by one on these different pieces here you're of course welcome to follow along and do it that way but just so that i can see the whole material on you know this object with a variety of different surfaces and things going on i'm just going to join this all together into one mesh again you don't have to do this but i think it's going to be a little easier to see what we're doing this shoe is going to work kind of like a shader ball if you've if you're familiar with that term a shader ball is basically just a an object that you build a material on and it has a lot of different surface qualities used for kind of analyzing that material and honestly the shoe will work pretty well it's got some thin areas here on the you know straps on the back some flatter areas around this section and some kind of hard surface details and some really fine details so that's really what you look for in a shader ball anyways but the way i'm going to combine this all together is by just selecting everything and then i'm going to press ctrl a and apply visual geometry to mesh you can see these all still have the various modifiers oh my gosh they don't i messed up a step so i'm going to press a delete all these and then bring my shoe back in file append and then i have the remodel shoe and a collection here called remodel and that'll come in which by the way i did make a few changes to my shoe model here you can see i added some different stitching just changed a couple details here i know a lot of you have worked on your shoe for a while now and i've seen you do all sorts of cool things so i'm not going to explain how i did all these little updates but i'm sure you can figure them out or we can chat in the comments about anything you have questions about so this object has all my modifiers materials no materials but it's got all my modifiers on it you can see we've got everything still on there but so that i can just you know have this be one object i'm going to combine them all and to combine them all you don't want to just press a to select everything and then ctrl j because then it will just get you know get the modifiers of whatever the you know selected object was the light orange one so i need to apply all the modifiers first and the fastest way to do that is to press a to select everything and then control a apply visual geometry to mesh what that's going to do is basically take what you see and turn into what you get so now if i go into any of these you can see we've got the actual geometry you of course would not want to make any changes to your object at this point because that would become much more difficult than working more procedurally like we did when we were modeling the shoe with a lot of modifiers which yeah if you haven't watched the shoe tutorial you might want to go watch that first but again you can use whatever so i've got everything applied here now what i want to do is that ctrl j but actually i want to delete this so this was my boolean object i want to delete that first and then select everything with a and then ctrl j and as long as i have a object selected that'll work so i've got everything combined here this is all now just one mesh and it's going to function yeah as kind of like a shader ball if you will so first thing i want to do is tell you the fastest way to get into a shading workspace is to use this little tab up here called shading and that will bring you into shading workspace which automatically gets you set up with everything you need pretty much it's got a node editor down here an image editor here which i suppose would be for maybe a reference image or something it's got a file browser here and the rest of the interface on the right side looks pretty much the same but if you're new to blender or you're not familiar with how to get to this point i think that it can be a little confusing to just use these workspaces so i'm a big fan of just starting with the basic workspace and then kind of building it to what you want and now we're basically going to be recreating what we saw just a minute ago slightly different but yeah we want to get into remember it's all about the lighting so we can't you know if we were to add a material to this now we would not be able to see any changes we make and that's because this is just a viewport display it's not being rendered at all of course you could if you wanted to adjust the color of something in the viewport you could scroll down to the viewport display color there but that is independent of what we have in our actual material up here so i'll make that white again and let's just make this white again so we don't get too confused here but yeah there's this little tab up here called viewport shading which is a method to basically bring up a material preview so i want that and basically what that does is automatically applies an hdri to your scene now if you were to render this this is not what it would look like because in our actual scene we don't have anything but what this mode does is basically adds a built-in hdri image you can see if we actually turn on the opacity there's a few options here i don't want to go into depth about them but you can explore these you can see that you know if you did have lights in your scene you could have those also displayed because right now this is only using that built-in hdri so this is the opacity whether or not you want to hide that world you can have it blurry or not blurry uh if you're looking for a specific reflection or something you might not want it to be as blurry so that you can see that reflection easier and then of course there's the strength and there's actually several different hdri images you could use a lot of times in product development you might use something like a studio environment maybe you could crank up the uh you could crank up the strength a little bit but yeah kind of pick whatever you want but i'm going to stick with whatever that default one was i think it's that guy right there maybe i don't know whichever one you want what the heck which one was it was so this one i think that one's a default but anyways so we've got that set up and now to build the materials you could build them over here like i started to and that would work totally fine for simple things that's going to be just fine but really what we're going to want to get used to working in is a shader editor tab so what we want to do is drag so kind of move your mouse into the top right corner of your screen here you can honestly do it over here too and just kind of drag over now the direction you drag is important there and that will influence i'm kind of where that new window pops up you can see if you drag down it does that and of course to close a window you can click and drag up into it so i want to change one of these to a shader editor so i'm going to go up here to the top left of this one and then change that to face shader editor and now you can see we have basically the same options we have over here but now they're in a much easier to view area right here so we can press n to hide this sidebar because we're not really going to need that so now you can see any changes we make here are going to also happen over here so it's a little redundant right now but just important to know that the changes we're making to this material are it's just to this one material you can go ahead name that like material one which is pretty much what it was already called and i might have spelled material on it too no i didn't so yeah let's go and talk a little bit about the principled shader so the first thing to note of course is the color input should be pretty self-explanatory beginners by the way i hope you're enjoying this uh more intermediate and advanced users you're probably skipping ahead because this is going to be very basic to get us started but uh yeah just want to make sure everyone's on the same page here but uh color pretty self-explanatory you click in there you can change the color of course you can do it with hue saturation value you can plug in a specific hex value or you could do it with your red and green and blue sliders there i tend to like to use hue saturation value the most but yeah i'm not going to say much more about what the color does because yeah it does that but this is a good example of why i think that this method of working in a shader editor and building your materials from scratch every time is much better than if you were to be working in something like keyshot where you have a material library because you know all these colors i'm panning through that basically just be like a huge grid of different light you know a library of materials you'd have to drag for different colors of course i know you can change them once you know what you're doing but a lot of people are big fans of material libraries and i think it's much easier just to change exactly what you want to change and i think we've changed the color enough so i want to move on to the next little tidbit we'll talk about which is roughness i think that by being able to change the color and the roughness you can basically make a lot of common materials plastics rubbers things like that especially so rubber is pretty they're not rubber roughness is pretty self-explanatory the more the higher this value is the more rough it is so 1 kind of corresponds to a value of on or on corresponds to a value of 1 and 0 to off so zero roughness is not rough aka shiny and one roughness is very rough aka not shiny and that'll be a concept we use a lot and it's common throughout blender honestly is that black corresponds to a value of zero or off and white corresponds to a value of one so that's just something to be thinking about but yeah roughness also pretty self-explanatory you can see being very shiny there if it's down at zero usually unless you're working with like a mirror or something you wouldn't want to use a value of zero um so bringing it up just a little bit might be slightly more realistic and then of course if you're doing a rubber or something you might want to turn that all the way up now the other things i'll talk about just briefly because we are in a little bit of a basic portion of the tutorial here specular value is not something you really mess with much but that's kind of the amount of light or reflection that the object can accept so if this is at zero it's not really going to accept a whole lot of like specular lighting like shininess so even with the roughness all the way up if the specular is at one it's not getting a lot or sorry i wanted to turn the reference all the way down and then specular also down so yeah you can see it's not getting that that shininess now i don't usually change this a lot if i am making like a rubber material or i really want it to be rubbery looking sometimes i'll crank that down a little bit and then the other thing would be if you're ever trying to make like a perfect black for one you could just disconnect the output there and don't worry this isn't going to come back as a poop shoe you could you could do that but also if you turn this to complete black and fully rough you'd think that that would just be pure black but because it is still exact accepting some specular light you'd have to turn that down to zero to get a true black like a vanta black if you've ever heard of that so i'll turn that back to 0.5 now another simple input that you may be interested in using is the metallic slider now i'm no scientist here but i've heard that something about the metallic materials behave different than dielectric materials or something i don't know andrew price has a tutorial where you can learn everything you want about that but yeah like i said i'm not really a material scientist and i've been using blender successfully for many years now not really knowing a lot of how a lot of things work and it's just fine so i encourage you to take my approach which is to basically just you know slide things around see how they look but um with metallic materials you usually want to be either one for on again or zero for off there's not usually a a between state that you'd want to be using but i'm not going to lie there have been times where i was going for a certain look and i just wasn't really quite getting it so sometimes i turn the metallic up a little bit and just start to do things that were kind of working for me but yeah just in general i want to encourage a workflow that involves a lot of playing around just moving sliders seeing how things look um but yeah that's metallic you usually want it to be zero for off or one for on and um with metallic you know of course you could make kind of a rose gold or uh you usually don't want to use too saturated and you know you could do like an anodized metal look or something by turning the the um you know the saturation all the way up but usually for more realistic like metals like gold and things like that things like that you'd want to leave the saturation pretty low but again play around with it see what you like that's metallic that's specular specular tint not going to talk about that because i don't really know what it does i don't ever really change it much of course feel free to play with it don't think less of me for not explaining it but yeah i just i don't really ever touch that anisotropic is another thing i don't really touch and some of these are dependent some things don't work for example if metallics all the way on you can't change transmission but i'll turn metallic off and then get us back to like sort of a more interesting color here i'll just go with like a a durkish red which i always tell people it's red it's not orange and isotropic that's something for like the example is always the bottom of like a pan or something again i don't use it and anisotropic rotation also don't use it now sheen is something we will play with a little bit again don't know exactly how it works or why it works but it seems to sort of yeah give your material if that's a term you're familiar with sheen it gives your materials a little bit of sheen which the way i like to describe it is it kind of lets the light wrap around your object a little bit more which is great for things like fabrics so let's just turn this to like a um a black for this example and we'll leave the roughness up a little bit now if we turn the sheen up it's a very subtle effect but it almost simulates like it kind of starts to feel like there's a little bit of fuzz to it and you can actually turn this value past one like if i type six there it'll really start to get a lot of sheen it starts to take on this sort of ethereal look but again biggest encouragement is to just play around with these values but sheen is something we'll be using for fabric type materials especially but i'm going to turn that off for now now clear coat is an interesting one probably won't do much with it i don't use this a ton but it kind of adds a second roughness value to your material and i haven't explained it but the way i'm rotating the shoe is pressing r twice i think that's called trackball rotation but clearcoat sort of adds a second second roughness value essentially so if we turn the clear coat on it's going to do kind of what it sounds like and we've still got that sort of underlying rough material but we've also got a really shiny clear coat on top of it now this is great for something like carp paint for example is the example people always like to say um so you know i could turn this roughness down and you can see we get this really nice sort of double roughness effect where if clearcoat is off we just get this sort of muted reflections with a a 0.3 roughness but when i turn clear coat on we still get that muted reflection underneath but we also get this sharp reflection which is controlled by this clear coat roughness you can see still very sharp reflection there so yeah great for car point paint you know if we turn this to a metallic material let's go for sort of a yeah cool color like that gold ish and then if you turn the um you know you can even turn the roughness like really far up and then the clear coat and yeah it starts to look a little bit like car paint or something a little more so than if you had the clear coat off and you just had your roughness down and see that just looks like a super shiny metal well you know put out something like that um just a shiny metal but then when you turn the clear coat on you really get it's a subtle effect but kind of helps make it look like it's got yeah a little bit of a clear coat on it um so an interesting thing to play with definitely now while we're in this viewport display mode we're not going to talk much about transmission that's going to be for making glassy and transparent materials and that's because those materials work a lot better with cycles you can do transmissive materials and sort of fake things like that in eevee but for the next section of this tutorial we're going to be working on building materials mostly in cycles of course you can follow along in eevee and i'll try to point out some specific things that are a little different in ev versus cycles when it comes to things like transmission in particular but what i want to do next is go ahead and move into another clean file where we are going to set up some basic lighting and we'll use that scene to start building some more advanced materials and deal with some of those other more advanced sliders like the index refraction transmission and things like that so stay tuned hope you're having fun so far intermediate users i suppose you've skipped to pass all this stuff but um yeah if you have any questions of course leave them in the comments thanks for being here and i was afraid to say like and subscribe um but yeah excited to uh keep moving on with this hope you've enjoyed it so far so right now i'm back in a pretty much default blender scene of course i've added back in my shoe model this one does have all the different materials sorry the modifiers on it because i'm not going to be moving things around too much of course i can still rotate around but i'm not going to be spinning my shoe around like i was before so yeah we're going to take just a little bit of a break from the materials to talk about the lighting so that we can start working on some more advanced things and just to get you set up with a nice view that you can eventually use to render your shoe out in something like cycles so what i want to do is go ahead and we're going to do this all with this in a full rendered view just so that it's easy to see and i'll use my i'll leave my overlays on so that you can still see all that so i'm going to click into the rendered view here and now i am by default rendering in cycles i believe the actual default is evie so if you're interested in following along in cycles you want to change your render engine right here in this tab to cycles now for most of what i'm doing you could still continue using ev and of course for a lot of people i know that's going to be much faster but for me i do want to make these adjustments and do this lighting in cycles and i'm using because i know people will ask i'm using two 2080 ti's to be rendering the scene that you see here and i'm going to turn on adaptive sampling because i think that does something good but i'll leave denoising off sometimes denoising tends to kind of muddy up the look of materials especially when you're using low sample values like you'd see in your viewport display but i'll try not to spin things around too much so i might crank this viewport samples up to 64. double the default now of course we can see that our boolean object is rendering here so i'm just going to hide that object that's named cutter so that it does not render when we render our scene and so that it doesn't show up right now of course so what i want to do is press shift a and just add in a ground plane now i'm going to tab into edit mode and scale this up just so that we have a nice floor on which to do our modeling and i want to make this a little bit of a seamless backdrop so in my edge select mode by pressing 2 and press e and z and just bring that up to something like that and then i want to add a bevel modifier just so that that has a little bit of a yeah a little bit of a curve in the back we don't see that hard edge so you don't need a ton of segments here something like that i think will work fine and we'll shade it smooth now even though we haven't added any lights to the scene we can of course see our object and see a little bit what we're doing and that's because by default blender is set up with just a gray world with a strength of one but when i am doing lighting i like to turn that down to zero and because the next step is going to be actually adding some lights in that's totally fine so i'm going to turn that down to zero and now we have our dark world and it renders very fast because there's no lighting in the scene so when i turn this on once again promise it's not gonna come back as a poop shoe i didn't mean to scar you all i don't even know why i came up with that it's like the way to start this tutorial off but here we are so i press shift a to add a light and for me that's going to be an area light i work a ton with area lights that's pretty much how i light everything occasionally i'll use point light point lights and spotlights suns very rarely but yeah most of the work gets done with an area light so i'm just going to move that to about right there you can leave it as a square though sometimes i do like to use disks ellipse and rectangles but yeah honestly this is like pretty beautiful lighting right off the bat i would say i don't know why i see such horrible lighting on a lot of blender beginning forms and forgive me i know that they're beginner forms for a reason but like literally just adding an area light and bringing it up and making sure there's enough power on it makes things look really nice i honestly i think the reason why a lot of stuff looks bad is because people leave that world strength at one now if you wanted to go straight to a look like we had earlier with the preview you could of course load in an hdr image i'm not going to show you how to do that but i do have a very old tutorial on it which probably needs to be updated but there are plenty of resources out there for adding an hdri to your scene if that's how you want to light it but for analyzing materials i really like to set up lighting in a very specific way so i know exactly what's happening so we've got our first light there now before we go into adding more lights i want to think a little bit about how i'm going to be viewing this scene how i'm going to be building these materials and to have that view sort of set in stone what i want to do is add in a camera i had deleted it from the default scene but if you did not you may still have one in there but i just add one it happened to be at the 3d cursor which is down here so it's kind of hidden but yeah now we've got a camera right there and the way i like to navigate that camera is by going pressing 0 on my number pad and then shift tilde you can sort of fly around and get the view you want but one way i'm actually going to set this up and i do this a lot is by parenting this camera so that it's let me just show you basically if we're flying around here you're going to have to sort of adjust your backdrop and kind of rotate it but what i like to do is just set the camera up so that it's pointing kind of straight at this backdrop and now one way to do that is by you can press alt g just to move it to the center and then alt r would snap it down but just to make it a little more visual we're gonna just bring in the n sidebar here we're going to change this z rotation to 90 so it's looking that way and actually i tend to like the y rotation to be the way we're looking so we're actually going to rotate this around we're going to rotate everything around just because i'm a pain in the butt and i like my stuff to be okay so rotating it is going to cause us some issues the boolean is trying to calculate this is why earlier i applied all the modifiers is because the boolean would try to update if we move the shoe at all and we have not applied that modifier so we'll wait here patiently again this is a nice learning example okay so that finally finished loading we're basically i wanted to rotate my shoe around let's just turn off this boolean for a second while we do this little rotation we're going to hide that in the display and then we're going to select everything except for these things and then i want to rotate my shoe to the side holding ctrl 90 degrees and that's just because i like the y-axis to be in and out and the x to be left and right when i'm looking at things so yeah sort of a silly thing but that's just how i like it and um now we're going to turn this boolean back on and we can keep that hidden which the effects will still be seen and now i want to rotate this that's where i noticed it was wrong because i like that to be zero and then okay so what i wanted to do is just basically square this camera up with the the backdrop so zero rotation is looking straight ahead making this zero is great and then i usually like to leave this at 90 though we will be changing it and then i like to just snap these to some nice even values the only one that we're really concerned with here is x making sure that's zero and this is so that everything is just straight on you can see if we move down here our shoe is nice and centered and framed beautifully there so we could actually leave it right there or so wherever we want it doesn't matter but i'm going to now add in a empty object and i'm going to press shift a and add an empty making sure this is in the middle you're seeing press shift c to make sure your cursor is right there in the middle add an empty i'll usually just use a cube or something like that and kind of just move that up so it's a little out of the way and then what i'm going to do is select the backdrop and the camera and i'll actually select this lamp as well and then select lastly the empty press control p and parent it to the object now when i'm in my camera view i can have the empty selected and rotate things around and the backdrop will stay nicely aligned in the back and i don't have to worry about rotating it but where this really comes into play is when we start adding more lights into our scene so let's go ahead and do that now one light i like to add a lot is a point light i'm going to put that in the back so i'm going to gy just bring that back a little bit bring it up and let's actually see what this looks like if we just do it in ev it won't be so flashy so you can set up your lighting maybe it is a little easier and eevee yeah i don't know i might need to go back to cycles but i like to put a point light in the back there and what that does just give me a little bit of a rim light um now you might want to bring the radius of it up so it can kind of wrap a little better yeah you know what i'm sorry i think we're going to go back to cycles but maybe for this we can turn on the um we can turn on some denoising here i'll use optics um so yeah this point light in the back is just going to provide us a little bit of a rim light since if we turn that power up just got a little bit of a highlight wrapping the edges here i don't know it kind of gives us a nice little vignette if you will and then we're going to add in another light and i'm just going to put that one this is sort of a three-point lighting scenario i'm just going to move this one over here and sort of point it at our object sort of in the back you usually don't want any light pointing directly at the front because that can tend to be a little bit overpowering and sort of hide some of your details so you usually want to be kind of off to the side so that they give you some nice highlights but you still get a lot of shadows and now where i was saying this empty really comes into play is we can parent these objects these other lights to the empty as well ctrl p object and then now when we rotate our view around which now is probably a fine time for me to go ahead and bring out a secondary view here so we can make this sort of our rendered view and this is how i usually set up my interface in most cases i'm just going to make that a shader editor even though we're not going to use it as a shader editor i just want to make a little bit of a smaller portion of my screen the render view so that it renders a little bit faster so i just did ctrl b to set a render border there by the way which my screencast keys are not on let me know if i if you missed anything so now in this view i can turn off my overlays um so let's kind of bring this camera maybe up a little bit let's bring it out and then maybe up a tad and then just kind of point it down so now with this all parented to the empty i can rotate this around and view my shoe from different angles but my lighting will continue to update and it'll be kind of oriented the way i had it set up so that we have some nice highlights we've got that sort of vignette in the back with the point lamp and that we've got the um you know the light above of course stays there and yeah the shoe just stays in one place so we're not moving that around but we can sort of move our viewport around so that we can view this shoe at a different angle still but i think that's going to be about it for this little section just wanted to show you how to make a quick lighting setup and it probably wasn't that quick but this is a tutorial after all you'll get faster and faster doing that the more you practice but i think something like this is going to work pretty well for me of course you might be interested in changing the size of these lamps to make the lights a little bit softer um you may even want to you know maybe add another lamp over here again i'm pressing r twice for my sort of free rotation mode and maybe something like that could go over here just so that the object is well lit but that you still have some interesting shadows and things going on um sometimes i'll even move this sort of behind the shoe a little bit maybe that needs to be a little bit big anyways something like that i think looks good play around with it adjust your lighting as you please and just get it to a point where yeah it's kind of great to set up your lighting honestly with uh no materials on it like this so you can really get a sense for the shadows and things like that and not be distracted by contrasting colors or materials that are super bold so i think this is going to work really well for me good way to just view the model and start applying some more interesting materials so let's go ahead and get into that in the next portion of this tutorial like and subscribe thanks for being here i really appreciate it alright so of course right back where we left off with the lighting here i'm just going to do a little bit of organization now since i think i'm going to be kind of moving things around maybe just a little bit i'm going to pull my lights a little bit further away from my model just so that there's not too much intersection there press alt r to do this so that that's nice and straight aligned i'm just going to move these out a little bit move this up a little bit maybe move this over a little bit and then maybe move this back just a tad still want to make sure it's visible and then um that's so that i can move this back a little bit and maybe up a tad now when you move your lights away like that you might need to turn the power up just a little bit uh there's some formula for like you know how far the lights are how much more you need to increase the power or something like that but once again i'm not the uh not exactly the scientist when it comes to that stuff so we're just gonna try to eyeball it back to a nice look and i think that looks nice so let's do another slight little bit of organization what i like to do when i've got lights and a little setup like this like i like to have i'm saying like a lot because i really like it is um i like to put these all in a scene or sorry a collection of their own just so they're separated from the rest of things here maybe i can pull this down i like to put them in a scene that i call lca so i'm going to press m move them to a new collection call it lca and that stands for lights camera action i don't know why but one day i was like what do i call this scene and i call it lights camera action and it stuck and so i always call my scene that has my lights in it a lights camera action lca of course if you have a lot of different things going on you might want to separate them even further but for me this is a very common scenario where i have the you know just my light setup and an empty and a camera i like to just have those in one collection so that they can kind of be all separated from the rest of things now to start building out some of these more advanced materials the first thing we're going to be really working with is bump maps and you know bump mapped materials so of course these do look a little bit better in cycles but you could use eevee but what i want to do again similar to what i did before would be to put all these together um so that i can see the material over my whole shoe actually you know what what i was going to do is just combine these all but now that i'm thinking of it i can just add and just make sure they all have the same material i guess it would be basically the same thing let's just do that so i'm going to make a new material let's call this bump tester because we're going to be testing bumps and then just for now i'm going to make it a color so i can make sure it's been applied and i'm going to select everything except this backdrop and then i'll select this last which you'll see it's been selected because the material popped up and then press ctrl l and link materials now of course the materials will not get applied to the camera or the lights because they don't accept materials so we're in good shape um so we've just got a basic material set up you know all we did was change the color what i want to do though now of course is get my interface a little better set up how should we do this we'll do it sort of similar to the viewport view that's set up in the shader editor we're going to make yeah we'll make sort of a long shader editor up here uh do you all want the shader on the top or the bottom i'm not sure what's going to make more sense probably the bottom or we'll do the render view on the bottom so i'm going to go into my camera view down here and this will be where we view our shoe is this a good setup i kind of liked it where was like vertical earlier and i had it split like left and right i think this would be good because the materials when you're making them more advanced tend to kind of go out this direction so that's a good orientation for our shader header always good to be thinking about how to set your workspace up in a way that works nicely now i think i will turn the denoising back off so uncheck that and let's go ahead and start building our first bumpy material and for this one we're going to harken back to our reference images from the shoe tutorial where we were using an adidas ultra boost or adidas ultra boost shoe i talked to my friend ryder he told me how to pronounce adidas and i don't really remember exactly what he said but it's a guy's name adi endos or something like that correct me in the comments please and while you're down there like and subscribe anyways let's start adding some materials yeah that's what this store is right now before we actually start adding the material sorry for the delay again i'm going to turn on an add-on that comes installed by default blender you don't need to go to any websites or anything just go up in your preferences and go to add-ons and then change or you want to enable the node wrangler add-on if you've watched any of my tutorials before i use this a lot so you might already have it on but just search for it node and then turn on node wrangler and that's just going to allow us to do some things that will make working with nodes a little bit easier and i'm sorry just one more thing i i think by default in blender 2.8 they made these little stringy thingies which apparently are called noodles which i also learned today they made them straight by default and i really like the curved look where they kind of like curve like that and i was watching a blender binge tutorial shout out kevin blender binge on how to change that so if you're interested in making them not straight but have that curvy look you can go into your interface or sorry themes and then it was the node editor and then noodle curving you can change how curvy those noodles are so just a little trick while we're there back to the adidas thing let's make a sort of ultra boost style foamy material now the way we're going to do that should we make it white or black i guess we can we don't want it yellow could be whatever color you want maybe we'll do black just because it might be a little easier to see so let's just do something like that gray how about that and yeah we want to do we don't need to mess too much with the roughness of course i just select my color there um you know maybe you could turn the roughness up to 0.8 or something so that's pretty rough but what i want to do now is be working pretty much entirely into this normal input which is going to sort of warp the normals so every face on an object has a normal and by plugging something into this normal input we can kind of warp what that normal is so what i'm going to do is press ctrl t with the principled shader selected and that will add a texture and again this is a node wrangler add-on feature you can only do this with a node wrangler so ctrl t will add a these three things so basically adds a slot for an image texture it adds a mapping and it adds a texture coordinate most of which we will need for doing our bump mapping but of course you'll notice this turned pink and that's because it's basically looking for an image texture that's not there and we're not going to use an image texture we're going to use a procedural texture we're going to be using a lot of procedural textures in this tutorial because i think they're really great for experimentation and just kind of playing with things figuring things out and just having a lot of flexibility in designing you know we're not going for a specific look here we're just trying to you know sort of have the tools to experiment and come up with cool new looks so i'm going to disconnect that image texture and i'm going to change that to a noise texture so with that select i'm going to press shift s and i believe that is also a node wrangler hotkey but shift s which i wonder if i can turn on my screencast keys so they appear up here because they're only going to appear down on the bottom which maybe i can change the color of them so they're easier to see black there shift s there that makes it a little easier to see right kind of like maybe move that over there just trying to help help you all out a little bit shift s and change that to a texture and we're going to do a voranoi texture and we will go ahead and let's just plug it into the let me plug it into the normal for now that's where it's going to go anyways now it's going to do that which is not really what we want and that's because to actually get the bumpiness going on we need to add another node so it's going to be shift a vector bump and that'll go into here and then instead of going into the normal this needs to go into the height because then it's creating the normal that's going into there now this isn't looking right still because by default this texture coordinate is going to try to map to uvs which some of these objects seem to have uvs on them already but for working with procedural materials a lot of times what works the easiest is to instead of using the uv input just use this object input and that tends to work really well for automatically wrapping this texture so you can see that that has now applied that texture in a really nice way around the object so that we can see it a little bit better maybe so that i can kind of spin around my object here maybe we need a little bit of a viewport so we can we can see what we're doing yeah so i was just going to kind of spin around here so we could see it from different angles you can see that it's really nicely wrapped around our shoe object there so with that selected uh we can see that it looks like it's kind of going in a little bit and this is another advantage to setting up the lighting on your own is i know that there's you know which direction the lighting is coming from so it's a little more clear that this is going the wrong direction so what i can do is just click that little invert button and what that's going to do is pop it out instead of popping it in now it looks a little pointy it's looking a little uh x-rated if you will all over our object there so what we can do is turn down this strength a little bit and that will make it still have pretty much the same appearance but it just won't be looking like it's popping out so much it'll be less strong if you will but really if you want to reduce that look then what you're going to want to change is this distance now the distance looks pretty much the same until you get to very low values at which point it'll start to soften out a little bit so you can play with that distance value a little bit to get something like what you want but but really the scale is going to be a better way to get that looking right and so if we were to turn this back to a white for example you can see we've got pretty much what the foamy part of the adidas ultra boost looks like so you may be interested in using this texture exactly for the bottom of your shoe if that's the look you're going for now feel free to play with the other options with the varroa voronoi here and that's going to be the case for pretty much everything we're doing i mean i encourage you to pause or totally leave the tutorial really at any point to just you know have some fun maybe you're moving sliders around you're having a blast maybe you're not doing what you want maybe they aren't doing what you want play around but i'm going to try to keep things pretty default so i think 3d f1 and euclidean is what you want but some of these different ones do different cool things again not going to go into extensive detail because i just this is kind of how i do i just play with the different sliders and drop down and see how things look one thing that is cool on the voronoi texture though is you can change this randomness and i'll start to be kind of like this studded look it'll look a little more organized less random and and this can be really cool for things like fabric for example or if you're making a i don't know what that would be like a studded look it's starting to get some weird kind of banding and weird shapes there when you're at off angles and that's a product of the object input so we'll get into it later but in some cases you may need to actually uv unwrap something to make sure it sort of flows the way you want to but that does get a little more complex but we will be covering it so that's the voronoi texture to make what i mainly wanted to make which was turning that randomness all the way back up and then making this sort of a white material you can see we have sort of created that look of the foamy ultra boost base adidas please don't sue me i'm just uh i'm admiring your your shoe cushions if you will so yeah that's about it for that one now i did mention how that sort of looked like fabrics so we're going to use a similar technique to make a sort of fabric now for this one let's use a more fun color maybe this orangish red it's not dirt red because it's orangish red maybe we use honestly i always like to work in pretty much grayscale colors but let's do a uh it's just sort of a yellow orange fabric maybe we can make it like a dark now i like it bright okay so you could do the randomness down and that gives you a little bit of a fabric look but one thing i like to do a lot is to use a magic texture so clicking onto that voronoi we press shift s again as a node angular hotkey and change that to a magic texture now the magic texture is a different texture that looks different i was going to try to sound smart there and say what it is but slurry just like yeah it's magic similar texture it looks kind of cool tends to work really well i think for fabric appearances if you will so with this one you know maybe turn the scale down a little bit you can turn the strength up quite a little bit and yeah it really gives you a very quick and easy fabric i've in very high production value well i guess they're not high production value if i do this but there are some finalized animations that i got paid a lot of money to do where there was fabric in it and this was literally the fabric texture i know online you've probably seen some crazy textures with like tons of nodes coming out of them but they don't get very complex in the in the dirk side of things because you really don't need to go that complex and this is fun because now you can change the scale really easily there's just not a lot to play with here and and i kind of like that it's easy to just change a few variables see what they do so yeah play around there but magic texture is what i like to do for creating fabrics now we're going to go back to a topic we brought up a little bit earlier which is the sheen so to make this look even more like fabric you might be interested in turning the sheen up so let's go back to uh maybe we do go to like a a darker brown color here something like that maybe even darker so the sheen is going to allow like i said light to sort of wrap around the outside a little bit you could apply an actual particle hair system to this but that gets way more complicated so sheen is going to be good for sort of giving that giving you that effect now with the sheen we do need to boost it up a little bit more so i'm going to use like a value of 9 or something like that or maybe let's just to see what it looks like let's use like a value of 200 or something okay so that's definitely way too extreme maybe we do like uh i don't know 15 or something like that play around with it but yeah the sheen it makes it look a little bit more like fabric because fabrics tend to like have sheen and since the principal pulled shader has a sheen slider probably something you want to use let's see if that angle we can see what the sheen looks like so sheen is on 15 right now which i think is pretty high value so if you turn it to zero you can see it just looks a little bit more dull and i think by using that sheen it does tend to look a little bit more like fabric so the last material i want to show you that has to do a lot with the bumpiness is just sort of a generalized rubber sort of a kind of textured rubber like you'd see on the bottom of your sole now for this one let's make this like a black material so we'll turn the value down you can see how that sheen is really coming into play there and then let's turn the sheen down to zero now we've just got our sort of black fabric texture that's created with the magic and then we want to now switch this magic texture to a noise texture so we're playing with three different textures here we did the voronoi first and then we did the magic and now we're doing the noise texture now the noise texture right off the bat looks pretty good basically just kind of creates um you know this bumpiness there are a few different sliders to play with here of course the detail is going to if you bring it way down it's just going to not have so much like scratchiness to you to it if you will you know if you bring that up that's going to look something like that it doesn't look that great but you know bringing it down a little bit you can see you have this nice sort of ripple on the surface of your object but to make sort of a really nice bump here and this is something i would use for like an acid etched plastic or something like that as well would be to turn this way up not too far i guess and then also use the detail so it's got yeah i mean it just looks way more detailed now there is also this roughness which can control it basically if there's no detail on then the roughness isn't going to do anything but if you have this detail turned up then the roughness will control like how rough that detail is and this is where you start to have to kind of go back and forth with your scale a little bit so if you've got a lot of detail then the scale tends to not need to be quite so high but again moral of the story today is going to be playing with these things seeing what they do now i will use the deep distortion occasionally that can do a little bit of a similar thing to the detail and the roughness combined but that will do what that will do is basically sort of twist your texture a little bit let's see if we turn this distortion up you know when you're in really close it doesn't look good but when you're zoomed out and the scale is relatively high this can i think really do a good job of sort of mimicking what could be like you know an injection molded plastic or something like that where you've you know i would assume the plastic molecules kind of are distorting around and spinning i don't know you need to actually get out a microscope and see what that stuff looks like but you know if we were to turn this roughness all the way up and maybe even turn the specular down a little bit we'd have a really nice rubberized looking material now if you're zoomed pretty far out or this is on a small part of your object you're not really going to notice it but this is amazing and procedural materials in general are amazing for getting into those really close detailed shots and not losing any detail like you would with an image texture now we are not going to talk too much about image textures today i meant to bring it up when i was talking about fabrics but if you really want realistic super realistic materials and you're not as much in this sort of prototype experimental phase then using image textures usually is the best way to get most realistic materials especially when it comes to something like fabric procedural materials great for getting up close great for experimenting and yeah great for just playing around so hope you are having fun playing around i think we're going to wrap up the bump mapping portion of this and next we might get into something like subsurface scattering maybe a little bit of transparency ramping up the uh intensity of the tutorial a little bit but hope you're having fun remember to like and subscribe and if you're already gone in the tutorial i'm happy you were here for however long you were hopefully you share your results with me on instagram or wherever you like to post them i would love to see what you all are coming up with especially now that it's been so long you've had to work on your shoe and i'm sure you're eager to get those materials out there and into the world for us all to see so uh yeah tag me share them with everybody leave comments below and uh yeah i hope you're having a a beautiful day and you're going for walks even though i do not think there will be a walk vlog in this tutorial which if you missed it in the last tutorial there was a walk vlog so you can see me walking for real but anyways thanks for watching i'll see you in the next part alright so now that we're done with the bump materials i'm going to go ahead and start a new material onto which we can start working with some transmission and subsurface scattering very exciting things i must say so what i want to do if i want to make a new material of course so we can go over here into our materials tab instead of jumping right into that i want to tell you really quickly if you're going to want to come back to this material for example and you need to save it then you want to click this little shield icon which will create a fake user for it typically when you start a new blender scene or close a blender scene if a material is not present on any object then it will be removed from the scene that's just kind of an organization thing the blender does but of course if you weren't ready for that then you'd be a little frustrated when the material you spent so long on is completely gone um so you might be interested in using that shield icon the fake user used to be an f which was quite confusing but now the shield makes a little more sense so what i'm going to do is go ahead and make a new material i'm just going to delete this one remember it'll still be there because it does have the fake user i'm going to click new and then we'll just name that one something like gummy because the materials we're going to be making next are sort of like gummy like materials so what i want to do is select everything and then deselect the plane and then let's just select that one control l and link materials so that these parts will all get that material and let's start with transmission so what we can do to enable transmissiveness is to just turn that all the way up and that might be something that you already played with a little bit earlier but yeah it's pretty straightforward basically when transmission is one your material is fully transmissive but there's quite a few things we can talk about here in terms of transmission and how to kind of find success when you're designing transmissive materials so the first thing you'll notice is that even though this is a very bright yellow it's still a little bit dark and part of the reason for that is that usually when you're working with transmission materials if you really want them to pop you want this value to be all the way up to one which you can see it did a little bit for us there and this is a little bit of an odd scenario where you'd have so many transmissive materials stacked on top of each other but this might be a more realistic use case up here where there's just this one thin piece you can see how that behaves a little bit better but let's kind of walk through some of these different things so first of all roughness of course applies very heavily here where your material is very rough then of course it's still going to be transmissive but it's just not going to let light through quite the same way as if it was a lower roughness value you could bring this all the way down to close to zero and you'll see that you get almost this like honey amber look it's really cool now there are two roughness values to think about when it comes to transmission so let's keep this pretty low there's another value down here you might have noticed right under transmission called transmission roughness which is going to do pretty much what it sounds like so go ahead and pull that up a little bit and you'll see that the exterior of our material is still sort of that shiny look but the when the light enters it it gets kind of bounced around quite a bit and it's not as see-through so i don't use the transmission roughness a ton but it is of course another tool at your disposal that i encourage you to play with you can even combine that with the clear coat and probably get some pretty crazy stuff let's see what that looks like yeah pretty pretty wild material don't know what uh what in the real world looks like that but i dig it very interesting so let's also look at the alpha so this isn't necessarily directly tied to transmission but sometimes if you're trying to make something super clear you might want to control this alpha value i think it's a little bit unrealistic because if you're familiar with working in something like photoshop this is kind of like just turning the opacity down on your object which you can see as we drop that it won't get so dark because you know none of the materials are fully opaque if you will they'll you know when you have this alpha can help brighten things up a little bit which is nice but again i don't think that's totally realistic so let's uh let's bring this back let's change so many things here alright transmission is at one rough this is a point four we can drop that a little bit um so let's turn this alpha down to zero for example and you'll notice that we still have like this really weird um this honestly looks really freaking cool if you ask me but um you might be confused like why that's so dark and we were probably seeing a little bit of that when we had when alpha was at one and this still looks kind of dark and that has to do most likely with the amount of light bouncing through your object so blender over here in the render properties tab has some defaults that are pretty well optimized but the the light pass is basically how many times it will allow a light ray to bounce through your object before it just stops thinking about it because if you let it bounce you know infinitely then you know just take forever to compute so it kind of has to make some assumptions about what's realistic and these are pretty good values most of the time but if you are dealing with very transparent materials where you have you know transparent material through transparent through transparent and they're like you know bouncing through each other you really need a lot more passes here so let's drop this alpha back down to kind of reintroduce that problem we had and then let's take a look at these light values so transparency is going to be how many transparent bounces there are in transmission of course is how many transmission bounces now i'm not totally sure okay so yeah if we turn this transparency value up it's going to allow more bounces you can see if it's a zero then it's not going to allow any transparent bounces to the object and you're basically just going to get this black look once again no poop shoes coming out we want to turn this up to uh whatever value until it's enough to let things bounce through the object successfully so looks like for this object 24 but realistically unless you're doing you know something like this where the entire shoe is this glassy material then you won't really need to worry too much about changing that past the fault but we could turn up the transmission values too a little bit if we wanted or really for the most fully realistic you could just turn this to full global illumination and that's going to put those at not quite the max full i thought full was like 128. you can turn it up way high but usually you know you want to leave it at the the defaults which i think is probably that let's see fast directly limited i don't know what the default was but uh see if we can undo back to where we were i think it's something like that so let's try trying this transmission turn out up and then we'll turn these balances back a little higher so we might not be getting quite as dark areas as we were originally so yeah this is a pretty cool material now just a couple other things to talk about with transmission and one area where you might be using it would be on this bubble so let's um let's duplicate this out and let's make a couple bubbles here so when you look at this bubble you'll see that it is you know it looks kind of like a solid object and that's because really it is you know it's just got the there's no double wall or anything it's just one object blender is interpreting this as a shell and you know it's it's solid throughout however you know that could be the luck you're going for but more than likely a lot of times when you're working with transmissive materials especially if you're doing like a jar or some packaging or something it's not actually you know a solid object you're seeing through there's you know there's a wall like a glass wall and when you're creating the transparent materials you want to think about if that would be present so on this one i'm going to add a solidify modifier doing just a tad bit more modeling here which if you remember from the last part what that does basically creates kind of this double wall so now we have you know blender is interpreting the you know the wall of the object assault but inside is nothing whereas on this one it's kind of reading it as solid and you may need to adjust the colors a little bit to get that looking how you like but this is going to give you quite a bit more realism when it comes to rendering something like the air bubble in particular that's definitely something that i'm going to be doing on my final shoe is rendering that wall there so consider using a solidify modifier when you're working with transparent objects but let me get rid of those for now now the last thing maybe a couple more things i want to talk about with the transparent materials index of refraction this might be kind of hard to see on this object so let me go ahead and add in a let's do a icosphere and let's make it a little bit smoother and then let me bring that so the index of refraction let's copy this material over what that's going to do is basically control what happens to light as it enters and bounces around your object something like that again no science lessons here but it's the yeah it's the index of refraction google it to your heart's content most realistic materials are going to have you know a value between probably 1.3 and 1.5 or 6 or so so i really don't change this a whole lot there are lists online that you can look at to see exactly what the index of refraction is for a given object but usually you want to leave that kind of right at the you know the standard like yeah 1.4 ish if we turn this closer to one it's gonna start to behave a little bit like a transparent material where you don't really are not transparent but like uh like had you turned the alpha down or something which i mean honestly this looks really cool and again i encourage you to go for some stylized looks here but usually you know when light enters a transmissive object it's it's bent a little bit kind of like a prism so you want to leave this typically you know again in the like 1.3 to 1.5 ish range is going to be pretty realistic so don't worry about changing that but that is just another thing that does affect your transmission so i'm going to get rid of that now was that the last thing with transparency i think so um so what i want to do next is talk a little bit about subsurface scattering so let's go ahead and make a new object i'm going to make this a fake user and then i'm going to make a new material here let's just get rid of this one and add a new material just to bring this up maybe a little bit and let's name this one uh gummy 2 or something like that and i will apply that material to everything except this and then ctrl l link materials so we've got that fresh new material applied on the bottom there and let's look at subsurface scattering so when i turn that up a little bit you'll start to see kind of what it does and the examples that people always use in the case of like a person would be you know if you're looking you know if there's a bright light behind someone's head you know how you can kind of see their ear becomes a little bit red and that's because of you know what's happened to the light once it enters the skin it kind of enters and then bounces around and comes back out in a different place again not going into the full details and science of things here but basically that allows you to sort of create you know rather than light just bouncing off the object in the case of you know a metal or a non-metal object it sort of like there's a little bit of a penetration there we turn these samples up just so these values can get a little more clear um but yeah with subsurface you've got this control if you turn that all the way up it's really going to completely ignore this top color but if you leave that a little bit lower and i think usually when i'm working with subsurface materials i leave this kind of on that lower side but again very subtle effect here but you can kind of see that this starts to feel a little bit more like gummy or like you know we could make like a glow stick material or something with this if we you know maybe turn that to a really light green and then we could also change the subsurface color to maybe like a like a deeper green or something like that maybe even turn the value on that down a little bit and then you could crank that up a little bit and yeah you start to get these really cool like yeah i don't know how to describe it like a like a plasticky just any material where when you kind of hold it up it's not it's not really transparent like glass but it's got it's definitely letting light through and again the best place to see stuff like this is going to be in thinner areas on your object which is why this shoe works really great because we've got these little straps on the back hopefully you got straps on your shoe but i think that's about it for subsurface now we can get into some really cool materials if we start combining these now i don't want to do this on the whole object but maybe right here let's um let's add a new material maybe for this one i'm not going to create a fake user here let's uh let's duplicate this so if you just get the plus sign with a material selected it's going to create a duplicate so i'm going to do gummy 3 and then let's um just so we can see what we're doing let's make that a blue and then we can select maybe this and i don't know a couple things here like this and this and this or maybe not that and then we'll uh yeah we'll link that material link materials so now we've got this uh sec separate material so you could combine subsurface with transmission and that's when you really start to get into some crazy colors so if we turn i don't think you want the transmission all the way up when you're doing this but let's get this value high the other thing i didn't mention with transparent materials is that if the saturation is all the way up sometimes it can be a little bit overpowering and dark sometimes you might need to tone that back a little bit to get the look you're going for but something like this i think is looking pretty cool now usually with these colors i want to leave them sort of similar maybe the subsurface color would be a little bit more of a deep color of the one before it just so that you know you get that kind of rich color when the light enters it but let's turn this roughness maybe down a little bit that nice and poppy you can see up here we're really getting a cool look maybe we want this one too to get that color let's link these now one other really cool thing you can do is sometimes when i'm working with transparent and subsurface materials they're just not as bright as i want them to be you can see we've got you know we can turn the saturation up the values all the way up the value can be all the way up on this one but they're still just like really dark now one thing you can do to really make them pop is to add a color hue saturation node and then i'm going to copy this base color so ctrl c this is one thing you can do about it is just hover over a color field ctrl c and then press ctrl v and that will copy that color so if i plug this in it should do pretty much nothing because when the hue is 0.5 saturation 1 and value is one it's going to be this color exactly but again this is getting into a little bit of non-realism but i can boost this value so let's say we put that to something like eight it's really going to make it bright it's gonna make it pop now again not necessarily totally realistic but it's almost like it's taking in light and practically like multiplying it and that's something that's really cool for making super glowy materials or just you know again really going for stylized looks here i think that that's something that's very fun to play with you know we can even do this on this material so let's add in a color hue saturation and then just drop this in and then maybe on this material we'll uh we could leave it white but let's do like a value of 10 or something so that's kind of yeah maybe a little bit too extreme usually when i'm doing this it's you know again i'm i'm usually working on realistic looking things so i don't want to go overboard here but just another kind of little tool at your disposal if something just isn't quite as bright as you want it to be then using the using the value beyond one is something that's is kind of fun to play with so we can see you get some really cool materials there we can even turn this one transmission up maybe the roughness down a little bit and yeah just getting some very wonky things here but i think we'll pretty much leave it at that this is like a little too insane for me um pretty cool just things to play with again that's the moral story here today is to play with these sliders move things around see what they do now i will do a quick little overview of kind of the differences made between what you're seeing here in cycles and what you get in ev so let's try moving over into the ev render engine and take a look at that so subsurface actually seems to work pretty well you can see we've still got that kind of gummy look here where you've got some different tones happening under here oh and the other thing i didn't mention with subsurface is there's a subsurface radius it's a little difficult to understand but this is the red green and blue like how much that light scatters underneath i've read a little into it and it's just it's not really a very beginner topic so if you're curious and playing with those values you can see what they do but realistically i would just leave them at their defaults and you'll be pretty much good to go in most cases but for transparent materials in ev you can see the subsurface works pretty well but for this one let's uh turn the transmission down and i guess we can leave the subsurface on because honestly that's looking pretty good especially considering how fast it renders i mean dude ev is just this isn't saying the fact that that renders that fast no samples are nothing but on this one let's uh let's take off the subsurface and let's add in the transmission so let's turn that all the way up to one which you'll know notice it just turns it black basically and i think that's because well there's a couple things so in the material settings if you're rendering an eevee you're going to want to change this blend mode from opaque to one of these other ones i typically would use alpha blend and that's not going to do much either i think this transmission might need to be or maybe it's the alpha you need to start messing with or wait here let's turn on let's just turn on all these things shadow with evie a lot of times i'll just turn on to none obviously you want some shadow but um you know for the transparent materials i usually don't want that so blend mode alpha blend shadow mode none so yeah i think usually you need to change this alpha value a little bit and that's still not picking up any color i think because this needs to be not one in terms of the transmission now there's a lot of things you can do with ev to like bake the lighting and stuff but um you know i'm not really an eevee expert but you can get decent looking transparent materials in eevee but really this is the i guess primary point where cycles shines past eb let's try trans value see if that gives us okay so that's looking kind of cool you know again this works and of course this is going to render way faster than if you're doing it in cycles but for really realistic materials especially when it comes to transparent and subsurface materials cycles is going to be the way to go but i think we'll leave this section at that if i missed anything let's talk about in the comments like and subscribe thanks for being here next section i think we're going to get into some more advanced procedural materials patterns ways that we can make you know straps and elastics and things like that so stay tuned thanks for being here and i'll see you in that next part all right so i'm back in pretty much a fresh scene here i've just applied a plain gray material to the whole shoe and i got rid of most of the other ones don't worry i'll be just fine remaking them if i need to so we've got a just plain material here and i want to go ahead and move into talking a little bit about how to use procedural textures to create some patterns on the surface of your shoe so what i want to do is i'm just going to use a couple objects here so that these stand out a little more like the sole for example and maybe the strap so i'm going to have a new material here i'm going to name that just material 2 or maybe material pattern just to be a little more conscious of the naming and let's just make sure that's something different and then maybe we also apply this to the that part so let's link those materials so that they both have it and yeah let's move straight into some procedural patterning if you will so what i want to do again remember node wrangler add-on hotkey ctrl t with this principle shader selected and that's going to set up my texture coordinate my mapping in a place for a image texture by default but i want to change this so i'm going to press shift s and change that to a let's start with a gradient texture just a kind of a basic thing to get us started now you're not going to notice the gradient you know depending on your object it may already have some uvs so you might see something but for me i do not have any uvs applied here so it's not really working so i want to use one of these other textural coordinates now we use object a lot with procedural textures with which can work well but in this case i think i want to use a generated sometimes you just need to play with play around with these um so we can see with the generated texture and by the way when we're working with things like this sometimes i do like to switch to ev just because it renders a little bit faster and you don't have that flickering while it tries to calculate all the samples so we can see the gradient is working left to right here and that's you know that's a pretty cool look if that's something that you are going for but in my case i kind of want it to go from front to back so the way i'm going to get that to work is just going to be to rotate this texture so you might have to play around with this a little bit depending on the orientation of your object and of course you know you could go for all sorts of different looks here i think for me i need to rotate this on the z axis by about 90 degrees and that should make it where the front is black and the back is white if you want to see that even more clearly clearly you can shift ctrl left click on the gradient and that will show you without any of the roughness and everything exactly what's happening so with the generated texture it's basically just taking you know the entirety of your object and kind of deciding what's the front what's the back and it's going to evenly disperse that texture along the whole thing so you can see with this object right at this very tip it's black and it's kind of hard to tell but at the very back it would be close to a perfect white now if you wanted a just black to white then there you go you got that but of course we could change this color by inputting a color ramp for example so let's add a converter color ramp drop that right in there and just so that this looks really nice i'm going to switch it to back to cycles so i could of course change the color this way so right now it's going from black to white but i could change this from maybe a black to a sort of a sunset orange and then maybe i could change this back to more of like a you know a purpley color or something like that and then very easily we've created this really nice sort of gradient from back to front and this is something that you know if that's a look you're going for very easy to do with a procedural texture much easier much more flexible than you'd be able to do with a an image texture so on the color ramp there are a few options you could change this from linear to constant for example if you wanted this to just stop at a certain point you can see kind of live exactly what's happening here and this is a this is another advantage of procedural materials is you can you can really have fine control over exactly what's going on but for a gradient of course if you want that to actually look like a gradient you'd probably want to leave it and on this color ramp you could add you know another stop here maybe in the middle you wanted to kind of fade to white a little bit just so that everything was a little bit more subtle that's something that you could do you know looking around the shoe here that's kind of a kind of a cool look but yeah that's about it for gradient textures i mean pretty simple you could of course combine this with some transmission or something like that and this is where i was talking about earlier you need to kind of have some control over your roughness and things like that to make sure that pops and if you were experimenting with different colors you could add in a color hue saturation and then you know let's try boosting this color value a little bit to maybe something like eight that is looking very cool and you know we've got this color set up here and rather than having to change these individually you could just adjust your hue here and see what some different options might look like and that's a really cool way to experiment when you're working with procedural materials so that's cool next thing i want to show you that is another relatively simple texture let's go ahead and circle select all these and delete them and i'm going to add back in let's uh turn that transmission off i'm going to press ctrl t again again i know i'm repeating some steps here but just you know it it's good to get in the habit of just redoing things i know after many years i've probably wasted a lot of time doing that but at the same time i'm very quick when i need to be because i've done these things so many times it's kind of built into muscle memory so it's not horrible to repeat steps i think it i think it does help you in the long run so i've got the image texture set up there i'm going to change that to a noise texture i want to show you how to make sort of a recycled material look now if we go back to shift control left click on that noise texture again that's a node wrangler hotkey that will create this viewer node so you can see kind of directly through to it once again it was automatically linked up to uv but for this one i think i do want to use the object input so i'm going to put that right there and you can see kind of what the noise texture is doing now there are two outputs here so color will kind of give you this cotton candy just for randomness color look which is kind of cool and factor is just going to give you a black and white and that's pretty much what we're going to want to use for this so i'm going to link this all back up and then i'm going to plug the factor in here and then we're going to use a color ramp one more time but this way this time we use it a little bit differently so let's add a converter color ramp and now instead of having you know this fade from this gray to white and sort of back with this texture i want to bring these values a little bit closer together and what that's going to do is sort of yeah make what was a gray closer to a black and what was you know lighter gray closer to a white so that we get this really hard edge here and maybe i guess we could switch back to it just looks so much better in cycles i'm going to leave it in cycles so yeah you get kind of a cool look here now if you wanted to make these dots less smaller or less zebra like more like a you know like a recycled rubber or something you could pull one of these values back a little bit one direction and then very easily you can see you can start to get if we turn up the scale here you start to get sort of this recycled material look and i've got my denoising on here which is probably taking away a little bit of detail but you know maybe pull this up a little bit just experiment with these sometimes i like to leave it on linear but of course if you wanted those to be really sharp points you could change that to constant and then of course you could also leave the black down there on the end and just move the white value until it's how you like it now with this one you could change the colors here just in the color ramp or you could also introduce a new thing which is going to be a color mix rgb and remember black is zero white is 1 black is off white is on so instead of plugging this into the color we can plug it into the factor so 0 black is going to correspond to this first color and white one is going to correspond to this second color so remembering that black is the first color we could change this to let's say like a like a green or something like that and then the other color could be you know a red or something i mean really whatever you want here we're just we're just playing around but this is a really cool way to create some you know just have a little more flexibility with playing with these colors and seeing what different things look like so that's kind of an interesting look there and then of course even after that you could drop a hue saturation now one of the advantages of working this way is that if we wanted to we could actually take this color and just drop this down into the normal and then of course add our bump map and plug it into the height and then we would have some bumpiness corresponding with the the texture we have up here so i actually kind of like this uh this black and white look so let's bring that back and now if we zoom in here you can kind of see this actually usually works a little bit better with the linear let's bring this up and maybe we bring the roughness up a tad too you can kind of see that now our you know our recycled look has a little bit of a a little bit of a bump to it and maybe invert that so it pops out just kind of a cool look subtle effect and an easy way to do different things with the materials so let's get rid of this bump for now and using this same noise texture i'm going to show you how we could make a little bit of a sort of like a camo pattern so the way i'll do that is i'm going to turn down for one turn on the scale a little bit now let's also turn off the detail so that things are a little more smooth less detailed and i'll change this from linear back to constant which we were playing with a little bit earlier so now we kind of have this base level of a sort of a camo pattern and i want these colors to be relatively even mixed so the left side and the right side of this color ramp are pretty even now with these ones i might just go ahead and change the i'm going to do the mix rgb thing again so i'm going to do color mix rgb and i'm going to drop this into the factor and then let's just pick some kind of cool camo colors so maybe this one's a you know a green and then this one is more of a yellow or something like that turn that value up so right there we've got the color ramp controlling the factor which is controlling how these are being mixed and then let's say we wanted to add in you know maybe a third color so the way i would do that would actually be to mix and mix this into another color so i'm going to press shift d to duplicate this mix shader and then i want this color is now going to be the first color and then on top of that i want to have like an orange color but for that i need to have a another color ramp kind of so that it's appearing in a different place i'm going to duplicate both of these shift d with them both selected we'll do that and then move this into the vector and then have this one control this vector so now you're not going to see any change and that's because these noise textures are exactly the same so if we just slightly change the scale on this one we're going to get a little bit of a different offset and maybe with this one we want the color to be more or less prominent so we can move that over a little bit just again to offset those colors and then you could change this to really whatever you want and you've got kind of a cool hype beast looking uh pattern there and you could easily go in and change these scales to make that pattern larger or smaller depending on what your preference is and then like anything after that we could drop in a color hue saturation and then we could play with the hue to try out some different looks there really cool way to play around if you want this to be like a snow camo look you could turn down the saturation or you know if you wanted to keep your colors but make it a little bit more like a hunter pattern you could have dropped the value there and again a really easy way to experiment a lot with different looks just by playing with these different nodes so i think that's about all i wanted to talk about with these simple patterns of course there are many different textures that you can play with you could like let's see if we just tried changing one of these to like a magic texture for example maybe turn the distortion down oh wait i think you need some distortion on magic texture turn the scale up yeah you're just going to start getting crazy things so anyways play around with those some cool ways to experiment with you know we did the noise texture and the gradient texture but there's a lot you can play with of course so encourage you to do that and yeah let's move on to some more things where we're going to be combining more of these different elements to create some really cool different materials so hope you're enjoying like and subscribe i'll see you in the next part alright so what i want to do in this final part of the tutorial is just introduce you to a few more concepts in regards to uv unwrapping and just sort of combining everything we've done so far to make a little bit more advanced procedural textures so what i'll do is i want to make my texture on this main object i want to make that a new material i'll just name that material 2 or something like that material too and just change that color to make sure it's been applied and it has now i want to add an image texture so i'm going to do my node wrangler hotkey ctrl t which will add the image texture and then i'm going to open an image texture so in my shoe folder i've got a texture saved here and this is one that i just got from a website called raw pixel i think it's just a cc0 pattern but do whatever you want here with this particular pattern let me drag out a window here so you can see exactly what it looks like it'll it'll kind of it doesn't tile exactly but it's a little bit random enough where imperfect uv mapping is still going to look okay so when we do the control t it does automatically hook it up to the uv input and we have not really unwrapped this object perfectly you can see if we tab into edit mode this is the uv map which obviously doesn't make a whole lot of sense but this is actually the original face left over from the cube when we started modeling our shoe our default cube is is back in the video and yeah it's just you know it kind of got stretched and pushed and pulled and it's not right so you could try using one of these other inputs that generated doesn't look so bad you could check out the object one or you know camera actually what that does is just protect project it from the view of your camera which will prevent it from stretching but you know if you spin this around it's going to be moving your texture kind of hard to see there but what i want to do is actually unwrap this in a quick and easy way and that's going to be there's a couple ways to do it but we could do u and smart uv project which is just going to kind of approximate where some seams and things might be and we need to turn that back to the uv and that will work okay you might get a little bit of stretching but at least gets it all in there another method that works really well in some cases is to do a cube projection so press u and do cube projection and what that does is basically makes like a box around your object that has this texture on it and just kind of shoots it straight ahead so that works decently for a lot of things but again not totally perfect but for something like this just an easy way to get that texture applied and you might find that depending on what you're using something like that works fine so with a texture like this a lot of times with colors i want to add in a gamma sometimes with image textures they just come in a little foggy looking and using a gamma can kind of boost those colors a little bit and make them pop some more the next thing i might like to do with image textures in particular is drop the specular a little bit just so it's not getting as much light and you get a little bit better one-to-one image of you know what you had in your texture applied onto the shoe now if we wanted to turn this into a fabric of course we could just do a we could do a texture magic texture like we did earlier bring that into the normal add our vector bump map and put that into the height and then we could just pull the object input from down here to add a little bit of a fabric type texture there just a really easy way to add kind of a a printed fabric texture and of course if you wanted to you could do your sheen there to give it just a little bit of extra pop and though the value of two is not doing a whole lot but that's just a quick way to add some uv the next thing i want to show you is adding maybe a logo to this which is a little bit easier to texture honestly so let's go we could try let's do our let's make this a new material we'll name this one material three and we're gonna put the dirk logo over the top of that strap so what i'll do is my ctrl t here to add an image texture and then i'm just going to navigate to my dirk logo folder where i've got some stickers already set up and if we tap into edit mode it doesn't look like there's any unwrapping there so let's just do a u and a smart uv project just to get it going and i'm going to navigate to that image that i just loaded in which you can see here if we move over here applies decently but because the modifiers are still on here this is just being mirrored across and that's not quite what i'm going for now to get this to load a little bit quicker we could switch this over to evie just so we can see exactly how that's being applied but let's um let's go ahead and apply that mirror modifier so over here on modifiers make sure you're not in edit mode press ctrl a while you're hovering over that that's going to apply the mirror modifier so now if we do this one more time you and unwrap normally when you just unwrap you need to have seams but with this since it's pretty much a single surface object it'll do a pretty decent job of unwrapping it now you might notice that this is a little bit wonky and uneven you could actually edit these uvs and do like sy0 on each of these to kind of straighten them out or an easier way is just to do you and then if you have a face selected u and then follow active quads which is going to do basically the same thing and just make it a little bit more even you can see it's a tad stretch there but really not too bad quick and easy way to get that unwrapped and then you could do all the same things we've done before utilizing this as basically a black and a white texture which is to control a variety of number of things a variety of a number a number of things so for example we could have this control the bunk mapping so maybe we pull it out of the color put it into the normal and then do vector bump plug it into the height now i've got a little bit of an embossed texture there which is really cool of course we could flip it around the other way and then you could even do you could plug this into the metallic value for example now remember black is zero white is one so where it's black it's going to be non-metal and where it's white it's going to be metal and i actually want the other way around so i can do a color invert drop that in right there and then it's going to look like that but of course you know we'd want to control our roughness a little bit to make that metal shine some more and you could even use this color to control the roughness so with that we could use either a color ramp or a new one called a map range so let's do a converter map range and that's going to work a lot like a color ramp just a little bit less visual but it's going to take your values it's going to be looking for values from 0 to 1 and it's going to convert them to values from currently 0 to 1 so no change but we don't want this to be totally shiny like it is now so maybe we bring this up to like a you know 0.2 and then the max can still be close to a 0.1 for like a rough rubber and then of course as always we could have this affect the base color as well drop in a color ramp which is going to keep it just the same let's say we wanted the metal portion to be sort of a gold metal something like that and then we wanted the rim to be you know maybe a dirk red something like that so that's kind of a cool way that we can work with textures as well just using them to apply and a little bit more precision than we did with the flower texture here you can see with that we've got some seams and things happening but for a pattern like that that's pretty busy you can't really see it that well and this is actually rendering quite quite nicely in eevee but for the next texture i want to get just a little bit more advanced let's get rid of this one i guess we could leave it but maybe let's just make the colors more neutral so we're not so uh distracted bring that up something like that now let's just get rid of it should we leave it let's leave it okay so i want to replace this color we'll just leave it named the way it is and then i'm going to press x to delete all this and now this texture i want to be a more procedural texture let's actually this is going to bother me let's uh let's get rid of this one link materials just get it all back to gray so with this texture i want to make sort of a wavy kind of woven flyknit type material and i'm going to do that with a procedural texture and that's going to be the wave texture so i'm going to press ctrl t again repeating some steps but builds character i'm going to switch this to a texture wave texture and you can see that that's what that's going to do it's going to add the wave texture which we control the scale and a number of other variables and this is using the same uv input that we had right here when we were doing the flower texture but with this one because it is procedural you might be tempted to use an object input or maybe even a generated input and that doesn't work so bad the object one in particular works nicely but this is kind of the look we're going for here where it's just kind of straight ahead but on the edges here where you can start these rings and not quite the look i'm going for so i want this to follow a more regular kind of pattern up the side of the shoe like you would find if you actually had a real shoe and you unwrapped the pattern and had a piece of fabric sort of draped over this so for that what we're going to need to do is apply the mirror like we had done before so let's press ctrl a to apply that mirror modifier and then what i want to do is you could try the smart uv project but that's going to you know because there's some sharp angles here and this isn't really a subdivided object quite yet it's um it's not going to do the best job with that let me plug this back into the uv it's not going to do the best job looking pretty decent but really if you want to have the most control over unwrapping an object you need to actually add some seams so for me i'm going to go around the outside here just holding ctrl let's actually just go like this and i'm just going to kind of work my oops i'm just going to work my way around the outside here and just sort of select the bottom rim of this and then a real shoe i don't even think this would be part of it it would be totally blank on the bottom but i'm going to add a seam here which is basically like a cut line i'm going to press ctrl e and mark seam and then on the back side here i'm going to press ctrl e and mark seam and that's sort of how the cuts would go with a real shoe but now if we tab back out of edit mode or sorry let's select all this with those scenes now added and then let's do a u and just plain unwrap which will utilize those seams now you can see i'll try to throw an image up but this is what an actual shoe unwrapped would kind of look like the pattern of the shoe is it would be you know flat across the top and then this bottom would be either not there or separate and then it would be joined up in the back so with this we can just you know we can control the scale over here or even in here or you could just scale it in the uv editor usually you wouldn't want to really do any crazy scales in the uv but when it's just you working with the model you can kind of do it however you want so for me i want to rotate this around the other way so that those waves are kind of going down the length of the shoe and now you can see we've got a much nicer even unwrap so when you're doing more advanced texturing you probably do want to do some actual unwrapping but that smart uv project works pretty well in a lot of cases so for this texture i don't want those lines to be perfectly straight i want them to appear like they're supposed to be straight but not exactly straight so the way i'm going to introduce a little bit of waviness to this texture which is already called the wave texture is by adding some distortion so if we add a little bit of distortion that's going to start to add some of that waviness but it's a little bit too small the detail scale i think is what we want to adjust so if we pull this detail scale down it's going to make that a little bit less visible again i want to go for a wavy look but sort of just to make it look natural not like perfect straight lines but you know i still want it to appear mostly straight and make the scale of course whatever you want i think something like that's going to work well for me you can change this detail scale it's distortion just kind of until you get it how you like i think something like that is probably going to be pretty good for me now i don't want to use this for the color input quite yet but what i do want to use it for is the normal input so that we have sort of a a bumpy look to this and maybe we change this from this green to a creamy color or something like this now that's not going to work because we need to add in our vector bump plug that into the height take something for that to load in ev and that's going to look pretty decent but if you're familiar with sine wave saw waves and triangle waves the sine should be pretty smooth over the top but it really doesn't work that well i wish this was a little bit better but sometimes you need to bring the distance pretty far down before it actually looks nice and smooth and maybe we switch back into cycles so we can see exactly what this is going to look like in our lighting scenario so when we've got that set up it's kind of a nice wave over the top there and that looks really nice and you might want to just leave it at that but for me i want to add a little bit more texture to the color itself and what i want to do is make it look like it's kind of made up of different colored fibers so what i'll do is i could press ctrl t but i'll just reuse some of these same nodes and i'm going to add in a texture noise texture we'll use the object input here and then i'll bring that into the color so now if we shift control click on this noise texture we can just preview it again that's a node wrangler hotkey but i can bring this scale up and like i said what i want to do is kind of just make and maybe pop back into ev for this one i just want to make it look kind of like a you know like there's different colored fibers so i'm going to add in a converter color ramp drop that right there and then let's preview that one and just bring these values a little closer together so that we get kind of this speckly look and you could even add a little bit of distortion to kind of help make those look even more like various fibers this doesn't look fantastic when you're really close but when you zoom out it's really helping to sell the effect having some little distortion and things like that so we just kind of have this nice little fibrous look there so if we combine those all together it's going to look pretty good let's go back and forth between cycles and eve 100 times here so yeah that looks pretty nice but the bumpiness isn't i'm not completely sold on it i think realistically there would be i would be a little bit darker in those crevices so one thing we can do to control this color so that it's not just you know all this one texture would be to actually darken those portions of the texture a little bit and i think the way i want to do that is by adding in a color mix rgb and i want to take this color and combine it with essentially black which will be the shadows so i want to have this wave texture control which portions are black and i want that to be in the crevices so let's use this same color input you could probably use a factor here i think it'd be basically the same but we're going to plug the color into the factor and then what that's going to do is just give us sort of it's going to it's gonna make the here's our wave texture so this is you know black remember is a value of zero which the way this mix works by the way is that if we look at this together um so 0 is going to be the first color input which is our noise texture we set up and then 1 is going to be the second so remember 0 is black white is 1. so plugging this into the factor we'll get a nice mix there so now we don't have the now we have the black texture kind of in the crevices here and then the noise texture pokes through it more on the top now if you wanted to make that a little more of a fine-tuned thing you could add a color ramp here and let's take a look at this i'll just bring this white down a little more so that it really is just in the cracks there not in quite the whole thing so something like that i think looks pretty good so that we've got those nice that nice ridged look if you will and you could use that same thing to control the oops and i think this is messing up because black was zero so that was the first color so we actually want to switch these around so you could change the colors here but i'm just going to move the input to the other side make that black and now those ridges are just a little more clear we've got kind of a nice cookies and cream look there but i don't quite want that so i'm going to change my color this is basically our color textures up here so i'm going to change it directly in the color ramp just kind of to whatever you want maybe a maybe an actual creamy color would look cool here but yeah that's sort of a easy way to build out a sort of fabric threaded look if you will you could do a lot more here you know you could control the specular value in those creases you control the roughness you know you could make this sort of a shiny thing and really switch up the look our sheen here looks like i still got it at 2 but you know we can boost that up a little bit really do anything you want here and have fun but i think that's going to pretty much wrap up this section just another way to sort of start stacking these effects and things on top of each other to build out some really unique materials but hope you are having fun like and subscribe leave your comments below definitely tag me on instagram with whatever stuff you make i would love to see what you're coming up with after following this video but definitely check out the next part where we are going to i think in a separate tutorial i'm going to actually walk through how i would go about making the shoe from start to finish you know applying the materials actually one by one onto the shoe but i really wanted this video to be more a way for you to just kind of see the different parts and pieces of the principled shader introduce you to some of the tips tricks different tools you might need to know to to make a cool object make a cool shoe use cool textures of course some of you probably aren't using shoes and tag me in those images as well but yeah blender obviously is a lot of a lot of fun a lot of things you can do and hopefully with this overview in this tutorial you've seen some of the things you can do with procedural textures and how they work really well for just making you know fun things and kind of playing around experimenting with colors and textures you know in a way that's maybe not totally finalized but just a method to sort of explore so thanks so much for being here i appreciate you watching smash that like button subscribe and i'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Derek Elliott

Views: 34,236

Rating: 4.9794393 out of 5

Keywords: blender tutorial, blender, blender 3d, 3d tutorial, easy blender tutorial, beginner blender tutorial, derek elliott, derrk, b3d, blender tutorials, blender materials, blender principled, 3d animation, asmr, asmr voice, blender shoe, shoes, concept shoes, shoe materials, materials, principled shader, procedural materials, product design, concept design, blender product rendering, blender lighting, blender fabric, blender gummy, realistic materials, blender 2.93, 3d modeling

Id: 0ZxWeMjxQug

Length: 99min 34sec (5974 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 02 2021