Pro Materials Are EASY Now! (Try This)

it comes to texturing in 3D a lot of these incredible renders seem so difficult when in actuality the workflow behind them is super simple once you understand how it's done look at these two images they both have materials lighting and compositing however I'm willing to bet that this one grabbed your attention more and that's no coincidence So today we're going to break down three different methods of texture and once you understand how these work you'll be able to take your models from beginner to Pro in no time alright so the first and probably most common method is known as image based texturing it's literally going outside taking a photo and slapping that on your model that's it there's not much else to it and this is how you can get those hyper realistic details on your model because the details are coming from real life but the major flaw to this method is simply how limiting it can be let me explain check out this concrete image I can slap this texture on my model but I can't really modify it or get wildly different variations yes I can throw in some Rust maybe some dirt grunge with other image textures but I can't change that on the Fly not without seeking other image textures not only that but if you try scaling the image up to cover more of your model you start introducing the scenes this is where you get that clear indication of where the texture starts and stops and overall it just looks disgusting now of course there are ways you can make these textures seamless and get slight amounts of variation to it there's even an entire program that does this for you with one image to create a completely seamless PBR texture set but the main takeaway from this method is that it's essentially a destructive workflow meaning once you've applied the texture that's it but to truly level up we need to look at one of the most powerful texturing workplace and that is [Music] procedural texturing this is the second method to create textures and it's also one of the coolest just looking at some of the materials and textures you can make with this workflow it's it's unbelievable wow it's similar to Method one in the sense that we're using image textures except these image textures are magical because everything about it can be modified at any time let's say I want to create a bumpy plastic material for this Nintendo 64 cartridge well with this procedural varano texture I can plug that into the roughness add also a bump node and immediately we have something super interesting happening just by dialing in the settings on this node and scaling it up by a factor of 10. you can see how quickly we're able to make an entire hard plastic Shader with basically no effort and by the way this is one of the most simplest use cases we can add so much more variation to this just by throwing in a second procedural texture like the noise texture and mixing that with the voronoi with just a few tweaks to both textures you can see how intricate this gets and again because this is procedural we can apply this to essentially any object but to truly understand the power of proceduralism we need to look at the concept of masks no not that mask a mask is just a separate black and white texture that defines what you can and can't see on the Shader anything that's black is completely transparent and anything that's white is completely visible Now using this information we can layer different shaders on top of each other so for example if I want to create dirt buildup in the cracks and around the edges of this cartridge then I need to implement a specific mask that finds all the cracks and does all the work for me and to do this we need a bevel node a geometry node and a vector math node set to dot product so basically this bevels the geometry procedurally giving us new vectors on the geometry we can then plug the normal information of the geometry to the dot product node and this gives us the product of the magnitude of two vectors and the cosine of the angle between them please come back this stuff is complex and you're not going to understand every single node especially not the math ones that's why I've partnered up with brilliant.org for this video and before you jump ahead I implore you to watch this section because if you're interested in things like procedural materials even geometry nodes I think you're going to get a ton of value from This brilliant has thousands of lessons available from basic math all the way through to AI with new lessons being added monthly using brilliant allowed me to learn all this complex Vector math in an interactive way and Brilliant makes the learning more like a game with challenges so it's something you actually want to do the course I would recommend just to get a grip on some more advanced math is the multi-variable functions course this runs you through the foundations of vectors and how to find multiple variables in 3D space but honestly just polishing up on basic math every now and then has been a huge help when learning things like geometry notes brilliant is one of those things I wish I learned about sooner because learning things like math and even just basic stem can be super overwhelming so if you want to get brilliant a go click the link in the description or just head to brilliant.org forward slash Smith to get a 30-day free trial plus the first 200 people to do that will get 20 off their annual subscription click the link and thank you so much to brilliant for sponsoring this video [Music] so coming back to this procedural material let's build this out from start to finish to get an idea of the workflow we already have the bevel geometry and Dot product node and we honestly just need a few more to make this really stand out that is a noise texture two map range nodes a mix RGB and a bump node first let's look at the map range node this is going to allow us to hone in the amount of dirt buildup there is around the edges so plug the dot product value into the map range value currently it's inverted so it's showing white where it needs to show black for the mask to fix this just flip these numbers here so two minimum is set to one and two Max is set to zero now to visualize this with color I'm going to plug this into the factor of the mix RGB and set the top color to an orange and the bottom color to something dirt like again we're using this as a mask so the white parts are showing the top color and the black parts are showing the bottom color now let's plug this map range result into the bump node's height factor and bring that distance down to something super small like 0.01 this is essentially done now but we can push this one step further by layering another procedural texture on top so with your noise texture plug the factor into the value of the second map range node plug the result of that into the bevel node's radius and now we get some interesting stuff happening but it doesn't really look correct so to sell the effect of dirt buildup we need to hone the settings in on these two nodes here are the settings I finished up with and this is the result we got afterwards okay now for the final step mixing the two shaders together this is probably the easiest part and it takes one node and that is the mix Shader so add in the mix Shader and plug the plastic Shader into the top and the dirt Shader into the bottom for the factor you should know what to do by now wrap your procedural mask plug that in and you've got yourself an amazing procedure little dirt Shader now that's honestly just scratching the surface of procedural materials and you can kind of go crazy with this but it's so important to understand the fundamentals of proceduralism because it ties directly into the final method of texture and that is different in it texture painting this is the method for accurate and artistic stylization on your models it allows you to create hyper specific details in precise locations and it's just way easier than making some crazy elephant node tree so now that we know about masks it's very easy to understand texture painting since all we're really doing is manually creating a mask and applying that to a Shader let me explain I have a basic rust Shader here and I want to apply it just a little bit of rust in the top right of the cartridge like this well to do that it's actually super simple all we need to do is create a custom texture so grab an image texture node and click new name it rust and I like to set this to a 4K resolution lastly make sure the color is set to complete the black we're going to layer this on top of the hard plastic and the dirt so again grab a mix Shader and plug them in like this for the factor this is going to be the image texture we just created so plug that in and now let's paint in the rust inside the texture paint workspace there's a few things we need to do before we can start painting first if your model isn't unwrapped then just do a smart UV unwrap and set the island margin to something like 0.02 and you should be good to go from here it's just as simple as painting So with a white color I can start painting on splotches of rust exactly where I want them to appear if I don't like the strength or size of the brush I can change it up here and if I want to erase anything all I have to do is press X to switch to the black color and paint it out but it gets even better when we apply texture masks maybe you don't like just the straight Circle brush so you can come down to the texture mask click new and hit this little pill icon that will take you to the texture properties and here you can change the type to something like clouds and now we have a completely different brush to paint details in this is like mask section we have a layer mask inside of a layer mask and honestly this entire process doesn't have a limit you can layer as many shaders on top of each other as you want and I don't know if you've caught on yet but the secret to Pro materials is actually the combination of the three methods these are not separate workplace but rather tools at your disposal to create amazing textures but in all honesty textures are just one of the aspects of 3D and one of the biggest problems I see a lot of beginners make is not having a blueprint or a guide on how to learn blender so if that's you you'll want to watch this video right here

Channel: Smeaf

Views: 55,633

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Id: rBx4zLY_V_E

Length: 11min 19sec (679 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 27 2023