Procedural Crystal Material (Blender Tutorial)

hello everyone and welcome to another procedural material tutorial so in this one i'm going to show you how to create this procedural crystal material in blender and we're going to be creating two different versions of this crystal material so we're going to be creating one with a displacement so that it actually displaces the mesh and has this very cool texture and then the other one is going to be exactly the same but just without the displacement so i'll be modeling this simple crystal material and then we'll have that so we'll have two versions the displacement and no displacement now just something to note here the node editor displacements won't work in eevee so if you're using blender evie then this isn't gonna work um but this material does still look pretty cool in blender ev and another really cool thing about this material is that we're going to be creating this custom node here with some color presets so you'll just be able to create these different colors create some different color presets that you like and then you can just plug them up to the base color to get all these different colors now if you'd like to purchase the procedural material then you can get that over on my gumroad store i'll have the links in the description and also if you join my patreon then you'll get access to the procedural material and that is a really great way to help support me and this youtube channel and speaking of supporting the channel this video was brought to you by my blender procedural material packs so every time i create 10 more procedural materials then i create another blender procedural material pack and so if you'd like to check out those procedural material packs the links will be in the description and purchasing the packs is a great way to help support me and my youtube channel and also if you'd like to learn how to create all of my procedural materials then you can check out my blender procedural material playlist on youtube again the links will be in the description alright so let's model those objects and then i'll also show you what i have set up in the 3d space real quick so i'm going to press shift a and i'm going to go here to mesh and i'm going to add an icosphere and then right behind me if you click over on that add icosphere tab right here you can turn up the subdivisions so i'm going to turn these subdivisions up pretty high because i do want to use the displacements so i'll turn it up to like a six or a seven um you could probably just go with six or if that's a little bit too high you could turn it down a little bit all right i'll move this over to the side and then also using the object context menu i'm going to shade this object smooth so let's now just model a simple crystal object so i'm going to press shift a and i'm going to go right down here and add a circle and then again right behind me if you click on the add circle settings right there and open up that tab i'm going to change the vertices to a value of 8 so it is much more low poly and then i can close this let's also bring this out of the way i'll tab into edit mode on this object right here and i'm going to scale the whole thing down now i want to fill a face here so i'm going to press f and that will fill a face and then i'm going to press e and e is going to extrude this out and i'll bring this up kind of high like that and then i'll also scale it up just like that then i'll press e to extrude we're going to extrude that even more and then with all of this top area selected i'm going to press the m button and i want to merge all of these at center and that way it's going to merge them all together into one single point all right that is good so i'm going to double tap the a key in edit mode and i'll press shift d we're going to duplicate everything and i can scale it down and rotate it over just put that into place and then i'll press shift d again that will duplicate the mesh and i'm just going to stick that right there and there we have it so those are the two objects that i'll be using to preview the material and then also to get some nice lighting i added in these two planes right here and i gave these planes a bright emission material and that way there's going to be some bright lights shining on the objects now to get some nice realistic lighting and reflections over here on the world i added in this machine shop02 1k hdr and this is from polyhaven.com so the link's in the description if you'd like to download this hdri so i just clicked on the color dot right here this yellow dot and i changed this to an environment texture and then opened up the hdri to get some nice lighting and reflections all right let's get started with the node setup so i'm just going to select this object and i'll just click on new and i can just call this procedural crystals and then i'm going to click right here and drag and drop this material on that other object as well and then i will also be using the node wrangler add-on in this tutorial so if you don't have that add-on enabled just click on edit and go to blender's user preferences and then over there in the add-ons tab you can just search for the node wrangler and just check mark the nodewrangler add-on alright so now that we have that turned on let's get started so i first want to make this look kind of transparent and be able to see through it so i'm going to turn this transmission value up so i'm going to start to turn it up and you can see when i start to turn it up now it's kind of looking more like glass now i don't want to see all the way through this but i want to be able to see through most of it so i'm going to turn this transmission to a 0.91 and that way you're able to see through this quite a bit and it looks kind of like a glass or a crystal material and then we can also turn the roughness down a bit just so we can see through a little bit better but we will be adding some values into the roughness later on now i want to give this material just a little bit of bump all over the place so i'm going to press shift a and let's search for a noise texture and i'm going to drop the noise texture down here and then we turned on the node wrangler add-on so if you hold down the control and shift key you can select nodes and that will preview the node now also with the noise texture selected i'm going to press ctrl t and that is going to add the texture coordinate and mapping nodes now we don't need the mapping node so i'm just going to select it and press x to delete it and then i want to use the object coordinates so i'm going to plug the object into the vector on the noise texture and then on the scale here let's turn the scale down so i'm going to turn the scale down to a 1.7 and then also i do want this to have quite a bit more detail so i'll turn the detail value all the way to the max which is 15. now i want to take this data and i want to put it in the bump so let's take the factor and we're going to put that into the normal to give it some bump now i need to convert this to normal data because this is black and white data but this needs to be normal data so i'm going to press shift a and let's search for a bump node and we can use the bump node to convert that to normal data so i'm going to drop the bump right here and then the factor from the noise texture is going to go into the height of the bump so let's now control shift and select the principle and you can see that is now looking nice and bumpy now it's way too strong right now it kind of looks like a rock material and that's way too strong and bumpy so on the strength value i'm just going to change this to like a 0.1 and now if you zoom in there you can see there's just a tiny little noise and a little bit of bump there but it is pretty smooth now i do want to add some stronger bump but i just want that to be in a few places here and there so i'm going to select this noise texture and i'm going to press shift d to duplicate it and let's drop it down here and then i can control shift and select the noise texture to preview it let's also bring this texture coordinate down and i want to plug the object into the vector so that's using the object coordinates and that'll place the texture on the object more evenly so i'm going to turn the scale of this noise texture to a 7 so it's much bigger now i want to make this more contrasty because it's really not that contrasty it's pretty gray so i'm going to press shift a and i'm going to search for a color ramp and let's drop the color ramp right in here so after the noise texture let's just bring these over and bring the color ramp over so i want the factor to be going into the color of the color ramp and then just ctrl shift and select the color ramp to preview it so i can now drag this out and that's going to make it more contrasty so if i drag both of these values together you can now see that it's very contrasty so now we are going to put this into the bump as well so let's take this bump node and i'll press shift d to duplicate it and we're just going to drop it here after the first bump so the normal can go through the normal so we now have this extra height value that we can plug data into so let's take the color from the color ramp and we're going to put that into the height and then just ctrl shift and select this to preview it so you can see we are now adding both these bump maps together and if you control shift and select the principle you can now see that there are some parts where it's more bumpy now i do think this is a little bit too bumpy it may not be that easy to see right now but i do think it's a bit too bumpy so on the strength here i'm just gonna turn this down to a point zero six so that is it is a bit less bumpy now i also want this noise texture to affect the roughness so let's take this factor here and we're going to plug the factor from the bottom noise texture into the roughness value on the principle now i want to be able to control that better so i'm going to press shift a and i'm going to search for a color ramp and let's just drop the color right in here between the factor and the roughness so we can now just play around with these colors and that'll change the roughness so i'm going to start to drag this black tab out and you can see as i drag it out it's becoming more contrasty and so it's becoming more see-through you're able to see through that better but then there are still areas which are much harder to see through and they're more rough and already that is starting to look like a really cool crystal material alright so now we can create the custom color so if you have a specific color in mind you can just take this base color and you can change it to whatever color you want i'm going to be showing you how to create a custom node with different colors so that you can change the colors if you want to so to do that let's press shift a and i'm going to search for a rgb and i'm going to click on this and drop it here so this rgb is just color value so it's basically the same thing as this base color it's just color value now i want to have five different color presets so i'm going to bring this way up here and then i'll press shift d drop it down here and i'll just continue to do that until there are five of them so we have four and five of them all right so i now want to put these all together into one node so i'm gonna press b for the box select and i'm just gonna box select these ones so make sure these are the only ones selected i'm now going to press ctrl g and ctrl g is going to create a node group and if you press tab that is going to go in and out of the group so it's sort of like you're going into edit mode of the node group so i'm going to tab to go back into the original setup and then i do want to rename this so it looks a bit nicer so i'm going to press n to open up the side panel and i'm going to click right over here on the node and then right here on label you can just change the label so i'm just going to rename it to color and then that way it says color right there now we don't actually have any of those values so i'm going to tab to go into the node group and i now want to plug all of these colors up to the group output so i'm going to take this color plug it into the group output and you can see when i did that i added a new slot here so i'm just going to continue to do that by plugging all of these up here just plug those all up and the last one right here so now if i press tab to go back into the original setup you can see that we have all these values here and we can plug these values into the base color now we need to change the colors and we can also rename these as well so let's tab into edit mode and then i'm going to make all the different colors so for this first one here i'm going to make this just fully white so it's very bright and then for the second one here i want to make this kind of a purplish color so i'm going to make it kind of pink and i actually don't want to make it too saturated because i find that if it's too saturated it actually doesn't look quite as nice it's a bit hard to see through the crystal if the color is too saturated alright so there's my purple color i'm also going to make this one kind of a blue color something like that and then this one here this is going to be a red color let's make that a bit brighter and a bit more saturated and then the last one here is going to be a green color i'll turn the brightness all the way up and then make it a green and actually i do want to turn the brightness up on all these so it's very bright so i'll turn the brightness all the way up and then just make them a little bit saturated so you can just make whatever colors you want so i'm going to have a white one a purplish one or kind of a pinkish a blue one a red one and a green one now right here on the node group we can change the names so if you click right over here on this group right here if you press n to open up the tab you can click on group and we can change the names so i'm just going to double click on the output right here to rename it and i can just call this white and then this one here is purple and then this one here is blue and then we also have red and then the last one is green all right now if you tap back into the original setup you can see we now have those different colors and if you drag and drop these in that is going to use those custom colors that we've created so you can just take a look at all these that looks pretty cool and then if you want to adjust the colors you can do that so i don't really like this because this looks a bit too pink and i want to make it look a bit more purple so i'm going to select this and we will tab to go into the group and then i can just change this color and i'm going to make it much more blue so that it looks more purple and that is looking much better all right so now what i want to do is i want to create a custom one as well so you can just make a custom color so i'm going to take the group input and i'm going to put that down there so now what i want to do is actually want to make a new output so i'm going to click on the plus right here in the outputs to make a new output and then i can just rename this one to custom so now that we have that custom output i'm going to take the group input and i'm going to put the input into that custom so if i now tab to go back to the original setup you can see we now have the custom so we can just make this whatever color we want and then we can take the custom right here and plug that into the base color and there we have it so we can now create a custom color and for the custom color i'm going to make this like a bright orangey color i think that looks really cool and you can see when it's super saturated it makes it kind of a bit harder to see through the crystal so i find that making it a little bit less saturated a little bit more towards the white does look a bit better and there we have it so there is the basic crystal material now i still want to do the displacements so let's do that so i'm going to select this object right here and then right up here i want to duplicate this material but keep all the same information so i'm going to click on this button right here and that is going to duplicate the procedural crystal so i duplicated it and so it now says procedural crystal001 so i can just rename this to procedural crystal and then i'm going to type displacement all right so now let's create this second version with the displacement so i'm going to press shift a and i'm going to search for a voronoi texture and we're just going to drop the voronoi down here i'm now going to ctrl shift and select it to preview what it's looking like and then right over here i want to take the object coordinates so from the texture coordinate i'm going to put the object into the vector so it's using the object coordinates and then on the scale here i've found that a value of 3.5 looks pretty good but you can change that to your liking so i now want to take the distance and i want to put that into the displacement of the material output and then let's control shift and select the principle now just like these bump nodes right here we need to add a displacement node to convert this data to displacement data so let's press shift a and i'm going to search for the displacement node and we can just drop this displacement node in between the voronoi and the displacement and i'm just going to drop this down here now because this isn't actually a displacement map we need to just convert it to displacement data so i'm going to plug the distance instead up to the height so we now have this scale value right here and that is going to change the strength of the displacement now you can see that it's not really working you can see that it's not actually bumping out of the mesh so what we're going to do is we're going to go right over here on the side panel we're going to go to the material properties and then i'm going to go right down here and you're going to open up these settings and then right here under the settings you can see there is this displacement so right now it is set to bump only but i want to click on displacement and bump and that way we're telling the material that it's going to actually use the displacement and as i talked about at the beginning of this tutorial the displacements in the node editor will not work in blender ev so this will not work if you're using blender ev so now you can see that it's actually displacing the mesh but that is way too strong so on the scale here i'm just gonna make the scale much smaller to like a point one and now if you zoom in here you can see that crystal is bumping out and we have that really cool voronoi texture so it's making the object all lumpy and it looks like a crystal and then i think the orange is really cool and i also do really like the blue i think that is cool um but i think my favorite one is the purple one so i'm just gonna plug this into the purple one i'm going to click on this object right here so the other one and i'll plug the purple up i just like the purple the best so that is it that is the finished procedural crystal material and there is the final render so that's going to be it for this tutorial so thank you for watching and i hope you enjoyed this procedural material tutorial and as i said at the beginning of this video if you'd like to help support me and my youtube channel then you can purchase this procedural material on my gumroad store and you can also get it on my patreon page and if you'd like to purchase more of my procedural materials then you can also check out my procedural material packs and to watch more procedural material tutorials then you can check out my procedural material tutorial playlist on youtube all the links are in the description so i hope this tutorial was helpful and thank you for watching

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 85,742

Keywords: Ryan King Art, Blender Tutorial, Blender, Ryan King, Tutorial, procedural, crystal, material, diamond, shader, procedural crystal, procedural material, blender, tutorial

Id: W9bl4VhVcD4

Length: 16min 14sec (974 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 07 2022