Procedural Sand (Blender Tutorial)

in this blender tutorial we're going to be creating this procedural sand material now if you want to download the project files for this it's going to be available on my gumroad and patreon i'll leave links in the video description now before we start i just wanted to show you the setup that i have here so i have this main light shining on this sphere right here and then i also have a backlight to get a rim light and then i just have a camera pointed right at the sphere and i'm also using an hdri to get a little more realistic lighting so if you want to use the same hdri that i'm using the link will be in the video description for that okay let's start so just select whatever object you want to add the sand material onto and then just click on new and i'm going to be using the node wrangler add-on if you don't have that enabled you can go edit and then go to preferences and then on the add-on tabs right here you can search for a node wrangler and just check marks that okay let's close this now so i'm going to first press shift a and i'm going to search for a wave texture we'll just add this wave texture in right here now because i'm putting this texture on a sphere i'm going to press ctrl t and add this texture coordinate and mapping node and i'm going to plug the object up to the vector now if you have like a more flat surface or something that you want to add the sand onto maybe you're making a like a desert scene or a beach scene you may want to use uv and you've unwrapped the mesh or you may just want to leave it at generated but i'm going to set it to object okay now let's control shift and click on the wave texture and we can see what it's doing i'm going to double tap or just rotate my sphere around a bit so that we're looking at it from the front and also rotate it sideways a little bit okay let's change the scale down because i don't want there to be that many waves and then the distortion let's turn this up a little bit so that it's a bit more random so it looks a bit more realistic and then the detail here i also want to turn this up just a little bit not too high but just give it a little bit more detail right in there okay now let's plug this wave texture up to the normal and then i'm going to press shift a search for a bump node and we'll drop the bump node in right here and plug this up to the height so now if i control shift and click on the principle you can now see what it's doing so it's adding those waves right in there now right now it's really sharp if i zoom in here you can see the edges are very sharp and i want to smooth that out so to smooth it out i'll press shift a i'm going to search for a color ramp node and i'll drop the color amp node right in here now if i click on this white tab right here and i make it darker you can see that it's smoothing out those edges if i just ctrl shift and click on the bump node you can see what it's doing here so if i make it darker it's going to smooth out those edges and eventually just smooth it so much that it's going to be flat so i just want to make it a bit darker pretty dark so that those edges right there are smooth because this is probably something that like if you're making a desert scene maybe the wind has blown uh these kind of waves here or maybe if the tide is coming in the water going back and forth is making uh these waves right here and then also the strength i think i want to turn this down a bit because it is kind of strong so i'll turn it a bit more down okay i'm going to ctrl shift and click back on this you can see it's starting to look pretty cool um this base color for the time being i'm just going to make it kind of a yellowy color but we'll go ahead later and add more color to that now i also want to add some little tiny detail because you can see on these pictures right up here on the screen that really close up sand is very detailed and it has lots of different colors and little bits of bump so to add those little tiny bits of detail i'm going to press shift a search for a noise texture we'll drop the noise texture underneath the wave and then i'll plug this vector up to the vector here now i want to duplicate this bump so that we can add this noise texture into the bump so i'll press shift d drop it here and then the factor on the noise texture i'm going to plug that up to the height and now you can see it's adding in a lot of detail now i want to make this a lot bigger so i'm going to change the scale to something like 200 so it has a lot more detail maybe even more like 250 so that it's very very detailed and also the detail right here i'm going to turn this all the way up to 16 so that it has the maximum amount of detail now if you can control shift and click on the bump you can see what it's doing it's adding in all that little tiny bits of bump there now this is actually too strong so i'm going to turn this down to something like a 0.1 or a 0.2 something like that so that we can still see that uh wave texture there so now if i ctrl shift and click back on the principled you can see what it's doing if i zoom in here it's just giving it a little bit of detail now it is really starting to look like sand i think i will turn this strength up a little bit on the first bump but you can see here in these images that sand has lots of little bits of color it's mostly usually kind of a yellowish color but sand is made up of a bunch of little broken up pieces of rock and so the different rocks are different colors so there's lots of tiny little variation so to add these little bits of variation in the texture i'm going to click on this noise texture press shift d to duplicate it and just bring it up here and then the mapping i'll plug this into the vector now the factor here i'm going to plug this into the base color but you can see that right now if i ctrl shift and click on the noise texture it's just white and black so we need to add colors in between that so i'm going to press shift a search for a color ramp node and i'll just drop the color amp node right in here and then control shift and click on it now i found that this color ramp is super important to actually making the texture look good or look bad so i'm going to be pretty specific to what colors i'm adding and where i'm adding them so that hopefully you'll have the best result possible so this black value i'm going to pull it out and i'm going to bring it to a position of about 0.25 you can see right here there's the position i'm going to bring it to somewhere around 0.25 and then i'm going to make the color a dark brown color now this white one i'm going to drag it out and bring it to a position at about uh 0.42 or 0.43 just somewhere around there and then this white color i'm going to change this to a kind of a peachy color make it pretty bright as bright as you can not super saturated just something like that okay now i'm gonna click on this plus button that'll add a new one in there and you can see this is pretty much the color that i want i'm gonna make it a little bit darker and then i'm going to drag this one over here and i'm going to drag it to somewhere around 0.65 or 0.67 so somewhere around there and then let's add another one so i'll click on the plus button bring this over here this one i want to be kind of a pink kind of tan kind of in between pink and peach i guess so something like this and make it pretty bright and this one i'm going to drag to somewhere around 0.7 so somewhere nearby that now let's click on the plus button again i'm going to add another one bring it over here i'm going to put this one somewhere around .76 somewhere around there and then this one i actually want it to be kind of a very slightly blue gray color because some of the little tiny rocks i found they seem to have a little bit of gray in them so i'll just bring that to somewhere around there you can see what this is starting to look like and then i want to add one more so click on the plus button drag this over here and then this one i'm going to drag it to somewhere around 0.87 and i'm gonna make this one a yellow color a little bit more yellow a little bit more saturated something like that and then this is how it's looking now alright so hopefully your sand looks something like this something similar let me just go back here now if i control shift and click on the principle this is what it's looking like so if i zoom way in it doesn't look quite like sand but looking at it from like this far away it i think it looks a lot like sand now one more thing that i want to do i want to uh press shift d and duplicate this drop it in here so we have another one and then i'll take this color and drop it into the height now i don't want this to be too strong but i will change it to somewhere around 0.25 or something like that oh not 2.5 0.25 there we go and now if i zoom way in you can see it's bumping out that white and pushing in the dark and if i zoom out here you can see it looks a lot like sand okay so let's render this out so i'm going to press f12 to render out the image all right it's finished rendering now so let's click over on this compositing tab we'll just do a little bit of compositing and here you can see if you click on use nodes it's going to have a render layers and composite and then i'm going to control shift and click on the render layer so that we can preview what it's looking like now if this background image is way too big you're probably going to have to press v to zoom out and alt v to zoom in and if you don't see this background image you can just click on this backdrop and you should see it okay now i want to add a denoise node to smooth it out because it's pretty rough right now so i'll press shift a search for a denoise node drop it in here between the render layers and composite and then i'll ctrl shift and click on the denoise and now it's going to smooth it all out now if you want to add a background i'm going to press shift a search for an alpha over this is totally optional of course i'm just going to drop it in here and then this one i'm going to plug to the bottom one and then this white right here this will be whatever background you want so uh in the image that i showed at the starting i just kind of made it like a blue color maybe to look like uh the water from the beach and then to save this image i can go over to this rendering tab and then right here i can click on this go to viewer node so we can see what the viewer node is seeing and then i can go image and click on save as and just save that image to my computer so there we go that's the procedural san material thank you for watching i hope this tutorial was helpful and again if you want to download the project files and also help support me there will be my patreon and gum road links in the video description but thank you for watching and i'll see you in a future video

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 14,080

Keywords: Ryan King Art, sand, material, procedural, Ryan King, blender, 3d, art

Id: suoF5H1Ro8E

Length: 9min 55sec (595 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020