Texture Landscapes BY STEEPNESS in Blender!

Oh what's up guys Justin here with the CG essentials compaq with another blender texturing tutorial for you so in today's video we're gonna talk about how to apply two different textures to a mesh depending on how steep the mesh is this can be especially useful when you're trying to do landscapes where you get steeper areas that don't necessarily have vegetation and then the flatter areas do so let's go ahead and just jump into it alright so what we're gonna do is we're gonna go into our shading workspace we're gonna start by adding a material to this object so I'm just gonna come in here I'm gonna add a new material and then I have an image that I brought in from mega scans you can find materials that like textures calm or other things as well it's just like a forest ground material but I'm just gonna do a shift a over here I'm just gonna add an image texture node I'm gonna hook that into my base color and I'm gonna make sure I'm in material preview mode and I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to open the material map that I'm looking for so in this case this is gonna be the albedo so what that's going to do is that's gonna apply this material to this face but one thing you're gonna notice about this is this doesn't look very good the reason this doesn't look very good is because we haven't actually UV unwrapped this yet and so the material is not really being applied very well to this object so the way that we can fix that at least for this one is we can click on it tap the and we're gonna actually go into UV editing mode we're gonna click on this or we're gonna select our mesh by tapping a and then I'm just gonna tap you and I'm gonna click on the button for unwrap and so this should be able to unwrap this fairly well just just by default because everything should be made up of quads if it was made up with the aent landscape add-on but now if I look at this you can see how this material is being applied in here but it's way too big so I'm just gonna come over here I'm just gonna scale this up by we'll call it a factor of we need it to be pretty big so we'll maybe call it a factor of 34 right now I'm gonna hit the enter key so now if you look at this material it's been mapped to this face so you can see how this material is being applied to this face based on our UV mapping over here and even this we may want to scale it up by another five or something like you just want to make sure that the leaves and the other stuff on here look appropriate so in this case I think that they do so now we have a material applied to our object so if we go back into shading and look at this now you can see how our material has been applied to this object I'm gonna go through real quick and hook up the rest of the maps because this obviously shouldn't be shiny because it's supposed to be a forest floor material some gonna hook the rest of these maps up real quick and then we'll come back and talk about what to do next all right so now you can see how if you look at this texture it's been applied in here and the light is now working with it appropriately and so what we need to do is first of all I'm getting a little bit of tiling in here so I might come back and in my UV editing maybe scale this down a little bit so I'm just gonna do an a then over here so we'll scale this down by maybe a factor of 0.3 or something like that so it doesn't look like a tiled image in here so now we have our material applied to this face inside of our model and so for your look at this rendered with the light applied to it and I'll go ahead and all add let's call it just a Sun for right now move it across here and we'll knock our strength up to we'll call it a hundred for right now and so now we've got our Sun material or our sun shining light on this and so now we want to do those we don't want this to look quite so uniform so what we want is we want to come in here and we want to apply a stone material when everything gets over a certain a certain slope right because in a lot of cases you wouldn't necessarily have all this vegetation growing along those slopes those steeper slopes so the way that we're gonna do that is we're gonna select our object and we're gonna add a new node so the new node we're gonna do a shift a and this is going to be a geometry node so we're add a geometry node in here and then there's a few different ways that you could do this I am going to do another shift a and we're gonna add a separate XYZ node right here and then we're going to add a color ramp node so basically what this is going to do and like I said there's a few different ways that we can do this is I'm gonna take the normal location for my geometry so that's gonna find the normals of this geometry and I'm going to drag this over here and then I'm going to drag the Z value into my color ramp and so basically what that's gonna do that's gonna allow me to use the steepness of the Z of the normals meaning that up and down of the normals in order to dictate what areas are considered steep and what areas aren't then over here we're just going to do a ctrl shift click on our color so what that's going to do is that's going to give me a preview of where the lights and where the darks are going to be and so what we're going to do is we're gonna use this color ramp in order to dictate the areas that are light and the areas that are dark so you can see how as I drag these together the steeper areas are getting a darker material applied to them because their Z value is higher so you can kind of play around with this but basically the idea is you're trying to use the steep areas to get a rock material so basically the areas that are black in here you want them to get a rock material the areas that are white you want them to get the grass material so we're using this in order to find that and just notice in some cases I've had an issue with this working and evie so it's working for me right now but if you just get like a black or a white material when you change this or like a uniform grey make sure that you switch your rendering engine over two cycles and cycles will definitely work with this like I said sometimes Eevee seems to be working for me and sometimes it doesn't but basically what we want to do now is we want to create a mix shader so or a mix we want to add a mix node and so what a mix node is going to do is that's going to take multiple materials and that's going to apply them to this to this mesh and then we're gonna use this to dictate where each material is going to be applied so the way that we're going to do that is we're gonna do a shift game and we're gonna add a mix shader' all right here what we're gonna do is we're gonna drag one material into the shader right here and then this shader is gonna go into my surface on my material output and then we're going to drag our color out of our color ramp into the factor so basically what that's going to do is that's gonna basically set this up where the black areas get one material and the white areas get another material and in this case you can see how this is getting applied to the vertical faces so we want to switch this out we want to drag this one to the bottom shader and then we're gonna disconnect this top one real quick so you can see how now what I have is I have a material where all the areas are somewhat flat or at least less steep and then I want to apply another material to the areas that are currently black in here so the way that we're going to do that is we're gonna add our second material so I'm just gonna duplicate this I'm gonna do a shift D to duplicate we can go ahead and drag the B DSF into the first input so you can see how now I'm gonna get a white material right here so this can be really useful for adding things like snow but in this situation what we want to do is we want to add our rock material and so the rock material is another material I've downloaded from mega scans but I'm just gonna do a shift a and we're gonna insert an image texture noon we go ahead and drag this into my base color and I'm going to find my rock image so in this case I have a rock material right here that I'm gonna apply so what that's going to do is you can see how now the areas that were black are getting this rock material applied to them the areas that were white are getting the grass material applied to them so I'm gonna go through real quick and I'm going to set up the rest of Maya I'm gonna set up the rest of my inputs for this rock material and then we can come back and take a look at the result in what's being created so now if you look at this you can see how my landscape now has a rock material applied to the steeper areas and a grass material applied to the less steep areas and so from there we could start scattering plants or we could apply a water shader to this or also a background there's a lot of different things we could do from here but this should give you a general idea of how you can use the normal orientation in order to create a mixed texture like this one so that's her man in this video leave a comment below let me know what you thought was this helpful to you have you used a method like this before I just love having that conversation at you guys if you like this video please remember to click that like button down below if you're new around here remember to click that subscribe button for new blender content every week as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this I really appreciate it and I will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The CG Essentials

Views: 27,885

Keywords: blender, blender 2.82, blender 2.8, blender modifier tutorials, blender tool tutorial, the blender essentials, the cg essentials, thecgessentials.com, justin geis, justin geis blender

Id: ksZbiYR3WQ4

Length: 9min 33sec (573 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 21 2020