Realistic Snow Shader [Blender Material Displacement in Blender 3.0]

snow is becoming increasingly more rare due to global warming though instead of traveling somewhere be it i decided to make some snow in blender so let's get started and let's get into it [Music] in this video we'll be covering the following topics setting up your blender scene for creating a displacement shader large skill displacement small skill displacement subsurface scattering roughness let's open up a new window by dragging a new window in here and with this new window open i'm going to hit numpad 1 to go into front view and then hit ctrl alt numpad 0 to link my camera to my current view let's delete our cube here so x and delete and shift a add in a uv sphere now let's hit ctrl 2 to add in a subdivision surface with two levels and we'll get back to that later now right click it and shade smooth add in a sky texture which is not working because we are in ev so make sure to switch to the cycles render engine now for a very important node make sure to switch this to experimental feature set and choose either cpu or gpu depending on your computer hop on over to the left and go into render view with that go to the world settings change the air to point three and the ozone to three to get a nice blue look i'm gonna change the sun rotation to negative 430 take our default light here drag it down in our scene and let's make sure we pull it close to our sphere here so we get some rim light on this edge as well i am going to change it into a area light which i'm going to point by holding and dragging this yellow dot we're going to change the string to 750 and we're all good to go now let's hop on back over to our modifier here and you will see that since we enabled the experimental feature set we now have this button called adaptive subdivision make sure to check it change the dyson skill to a number that works for you i'm going to leave it at 1 but you can go lower if your computer can handle it or higher if it doesn't handle it change our window here to a shader editor now let's add in a new material give it a name i'm going to call my patreon just putting it out there if you don't want to make this material yourself feel free to join the patreon and download the project file as well as all the other project files i've done before we're going to start off by working on the displacement and we're going to do that by adding in a noise texture let's take our factor here and let's plug it into a displacement node plug it into the height now take this and plug it into the displacement and you'll see something is happening on the left side here now this is not actual displacement this is basically just bump and that has to do with the material settings so if we go into the materials tab here on the right side scroll down into the settings we can go over here and change this from bump only to displacement and bump and now you will see we actually get some deformation on our geometry i am going to change a few parameters on this noise texture because this is a lot of displacement and i want less so i'm going to go for something like a one i'll leave everything as default now i might change the overall skill of the displacement to something like 0.7 or so now i'm going to hit ctrl t with the noise texture select selected this is a node wrangler add-on feature so make sure you have that enabled and i'm going to change the texture coordinate to object now let's duplicate our noise texture and duplicate our displacement and take our mapping and plug it into the vector of our noise texture let's take our factor and plug it into the height again let's plug this into the displacement now we get exactly the same results which makes sense because we are inputting the same data and instead i'm going to change the skill here so i'm going to go for something like 80 or so and i'm going to take the detail down to zero and the roughness down to zero and um it looks like i don't know like a sea urchin or something um but we can decrease the skill here so in the displacement i'm going to change the scale to something like a point one for now and let's see how that looks okay so this basically sort of looks like a plaster you know like a rough plaster wall in essence this is what we want but the overall shape which is the large scale displacement if you will has not been added in this case so we only have the small scale displacement and we see that the shader is still looking like an exact sphere so we need a way to combine this now if i control shift and click on this displacement node up here we get to see the actual viewer node output of this so the surface output and you will see that the displacement node outputs a color range and this color drives the displacement if i do this for this one you will see we get something similar but just way more speckled because we have a lot bigger or actually a lot smaller skill so how can we actually do something with this i'm going to re-enable the principal psdf shader by ctrl shift clicking it and since both our displacement nodes have a color output usually we just use a mix rgb node to mix in the rgb values i'm going to take this displacement and this displacement plug it into the mix rgb node and plug it into the displacement this hits something however it sort of mix the two together so this is one this is the other and the middle ground so 0.5 is exactly halfway to both of these but i don't want that i want them added together so instead of mix we're going to choose the add blending mode and now we get both the displacement on one side so the large scale displacement and also the small scale displacement on the other side all right so that's actually all the displacement we need to do next up we want to cover the subsurface scattering and you might wonder okay so why subsurface why not something like transmission or something well transmission i guess sort of works but ice is just basically a solid made of water and it is sort of see-through but it also is not a perfect material so that's why the light bounces inside of ice and creating this bluish or this subsurface look so if you now enable the subsurface and set it to one you'll see the entire shader immediately starts looking completely different most of all it sort of looks kind of nasty right now because the inside is pinkish and that's because the basic setup or the subsurface is set for a skin shader so we are going to change the color and let me first change the overall subsurface color so let's go over to rgb and we're going to use an rgb value of 0.4.5.6 now this will give you a very light gray nearly bluish tint perfect for snow and we're going to do the same with the subsurface radius so this radius is basically an rgb slider as well so this is red this is green and the other one is blue so we're gonna copy the same color here so point four point five point six and you will see boom this is starting to look like snow let me just zoom in a little bit i think this is looking already like snow a lot and i really like how this looks so so i might take this skill down slightly to something like a 60 or so i think it looks slightly more natural to have a bit more contrast in the scale there and shorter larger chunks as well all right so subsurface scattering works perfect the final thing is though that we need roughness and it's now just the basic 0.5 roughness and if i set it all the way to one you will see it's completely rough and i guess that sort of works for snow but also there's this glint and if i set it all the way to zero you don't really see a difference and that's because it's now completely reflective but the subsurface is sort of overtaking the shine as well so what we want to do is actually create some sort of highlight and we have this noise texture over here and we have the factor output here so if i take a color ram set it over there and take this factory and plug it into the color ramp and then preview the color ramp you will see this is the output of our noise texture so basically our height map and we can crank in these values and make sure we are starting to get a lot more reflectiveness with these dots however um first of all the reflective parts which are the black parts are all on the inside right now and the highlights are on the outside but they are non-reflective so we need to flip these colors so i'm going to take it over here and go over something like this might just drag this in a little bit go for something like that and the other thing is that the white parts which are now non-reflective need to be slightly reflective as well because snow is basically still eyes so i'm going to take this white color and make it mid gray which will give it some reflection as well alright so with this done we can now re-enable our principled bsdf shader and we can take the color and plug it into the roughness here and now what we should get is we should get some of these highlights popping up here you see them over there just in between all of these sort of ice particles that we created and they will highlight and sparkle just like actual snow will also i think the displacement for the small scale displacements might be a bit too strong so i'm going to go for 0.05.06 let me try 0.06 first yeah okay i think this is better so we now get a bit more reflection because the depth of the displacement is less so there's more light catching in between um and i think this is looking um this is looking like an actual snowball to me i mean yeah there it is all right so this is the snow shader all done pause the video here if you want a complete overview of the note setup so this is the entire shader super simple i hope you enjoyed the video and if you did then please leave a like and subscribe i want to thank you for watching and see you in the next one thanks to the following patrons for supporting the channel please consider becoming a patron yourself [Music] you

Channel: Kaizen

Views: 36,769

Keywords: blender material tutorial, blender snow texture, blender snow shader, blender snow material, blender shader tutorial, blender 3.0, blender texture tutorial, blender shader nodes, blender material displacement, blender displacement, blender texture displacement, blender shader displacement, blender 3.0 material, blender 3.0 shader, blender 3.0 texture

Id: fcDFntILn0M

Length: 8min 46sec (526 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 03 2022