The Basics of Good Texturing in Blender

in cg a good material can mean the difference between a boring flat image and one that looks realistic and pleasing to the eye if you've ever struggled trying to make a material look realistic you're not alone in a survey I conducted earlier this year blendy users voted it as one of their biggest frustrations which is why I'm making this video the biggest mistake a lot of artists make when making a new material is downloading a texture and just applying it to the surface the problem with this is that you're working with three-dimensional software and since there's nothing in your image texture to signify the shape of the object it ends up looking like a photo that's been glued to a piece of cardboard so you need to help the 3d software to understand the material by making variations of the texture then using those variations to signify where the small bumps are where the gaps in the wood are where to put the most reflection or the scratches and dirt and suddenly the material begins to look a lot more realistic this is the method that I use to make the materials in my architecture Academy trailers and best of all it's actually really easy to do once you know the basic steps so that's what you're going to learn in this tutorial within the next five minutes you'll discover how to take this image texture and create a bump map reflection map and displacement map from it then we'll put it all into blender to create a realistic material that goes from this to this so to start with you want to download this image using the link below then open up blender or your 3d software of choice and load the texture onto an unwrapped plane go to the node editor add the image texture and connect it to the default diffuse shader add a glossy shader and then combine the two of them together using a mixer and so that you can see what you're doing add a sphere that emits blue light so we now have a simple texture applied to a plane now let's get onto the texture variations first up the bump map the bombe map is integral to any material as it simulates surface level bumps casting shadows and disrupting the reflections every single surface in the real world has bumps so it's integral for the realism of any material there's two ways to create a bump map one is to create a black and white image and the other is to create a normal map now both create good enough results but the latter requires special software and more fiddling I've already made a tutorial on normal maps which you can watch here but for this video we're going to proceed with the black and white balk map so jump into an image editing software like Photoshop and start by converting your original texture to grayscale the reason you need to do this is that the 3d software will treat the light values as raised bumps and the dark values as the dips or crevasses so with that in mind we're going to adjust the levels so that the lines between the tiles are really dark you may want to tweak it more to get a nice mix of white and gray values across the top but this is pretty much it all you need to do now is save it as a separate jpg and return to blender then in the node editor add your new image file and feed it through a bump node then connect it to both the diffuse and glossy shader a very important point though is that you set the image texture type to non color data and that's so that cycles can pull the correct data from it you'll now notice when rendering that the material now has subtle bumps across the surface which cause shadows and affect the reflections now we're going to take it a step further by creating the reflection or specularity map this will be used to tell the 3d software which parts of the material are shiny and which parts are not it's a surprisingly important part of the material so don't give it go to Photoshop and tweak the levels more the dark values will mean no reflection and the light values will obviously get reflections now I obviously don't want reflections in the crevices so I'm making them really black but I want to get a healthy amount of reflection across the tiles with a subtle amount of gray in there just for some visual interest save that as a new JPEG then once again add that image to the node editor and this time connect it to the factor input of the mix shader and just like before make sure you set the type to non color data so what all this will do is is instead of it casting a blanket amount of gloss over the entire plane it's now going to read the image that we've just created and it's going to put the gloss wherever there's white in the image and diffuse wherever there's black rendering it now it looks pretty good so we've got three textures in our material the original diffuse texture a bump map and a reflection map the results already look far better than what we started with but there's one more thing that we can do which will push the realism even further and that's by creating a displacement map a displacement map is used for large-scale detail I use it heavily in my Clips tutorial to create detailed rocks from an image texture the large-scale detail in this texture are the gaps between the tiles trying to model this by hand would be a nightmare but we can do it quickly with a displacement map unlike the other textures this one actually distorts the geometry of the model and therefore requires a high level of Polly's so subdivide the plane 100 times and then add a subsurf modifier at level 3 which should give us enough geometry for the displacement to work with so we're going to jump back into Photoshop and this time we're going to crank the levels so that we can really only see the black crevasses everything else should be white then in your 3d software you want to load that in as a displacement to do that in blender just a displacement modifier underneath the subserve and click add a new texture for the texture set it to the image you just created adjust the strength of the displacement to something low like point zero zero two and you now have actual crevasses carved into your plane the benefit of all this hard work is that the light actually reflects off the edges of the crevasses and the shadows are much deeper making the material overall look much more realistic the downside is that the render times have increased so if you were using this for an animation you'd probably want to bake it but that's beyond the scope of this tutorial so there you have it a realistic material created using your own custom texture maps creating your own texture Maps is a lot of fun and really valuable for learning especially at the start but when you're working on a really large scene it will slow things down which is why I'm working on a new texture website that provides the normal displacement and reflection maps for you it's not yet finished but in the future I'll be looking for beta testers to give some early feedback on the site if you'd like to test the site when it comes available click the link below and enter your email but that's it for me remember that when you're making your next realistic material you need a minimum of the bump map reflection and displacement map and if you'd like to take it a step further try adding your own grunge scratches or paint to the texture for more info on texturing watch my secret to advanced texturing tutorial or how to create rust if you learn something from this video click like and so that you don't miss future blender tutorials like this one click subscribe that's it from me thanks for watching

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 858,344

Keywords: Blender (Software), Texture Mapping, texturing, materials, Tutorial (Media Genre)

Id: rzXNZkEoTAk

Length: 7min 39sec (459 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 29 2015