The BEST Material Add-Ons for Blender!

what's up guys Justin here with the CG essentials.com so in this video we're going to check out some of the top material add-ons for blender let's go ahead and just jump into it alright so just a note in this video we're going to focus specifically on um we're going to focus specifically on add-ons that actually have like material libraries or allow you to apply like damage um UV add-ons would be something separate that might be covered in a separate video but um let's go ahead and get started so first off so we've got Sanctus Library so Sanctus library is a procedural material tool set that you can download from the blender market so there is a light version you can download for free or you can get the entire library for personal or commercial use right here note these are currently on sale as a part of the blender market Spring sale um that that's not always going to be the case but for the amount of time you could save with a lot of these it's usually going to be worth it anyway but that's kind of up to you but Sanctus library is basically a collection of procedural objects and so what they do is these are procedural materials meaning that they are adjustable so it currently has a library of 375 procedural materials and all of them are adjustable in the sense that you can change things like some of them have offset some of them allow you to add water you can tilt tiles do a lot of different things like that so if I jump over into blender just to give you kind of an idea this is one of their aging tiles tools I do not have this in rendered mode by the way this is just a material preview mode there would be displacement in rendered mode but basically what this does is this allows us to do things like select a material and it's going to allow us to adjust things like first off like the scale of the tile right you can make it bigger or smaller but then there's a ton more where you can adjust these along like an X or Y axis you can adjust the thickness of the mortar that's in here with the tile as well as adjusting things like if the tiles are damaged so notice how if I pull this up this is going to add procedural damage in here you can also set that if there are pieces missing by clicking and dragging this right here so you can adjust things like damage you can set if pieces are missing using all of these procedural settings so you can use these to set up different procedural materials inside a blender you can also adjust things like the displacement which I don't really want to switch over into Cycles right now but if you were to because it usually crashes my screen recording software but this does apply and create that displacement in here so these tiles wouldn't be a hundred percent flat so you can see there's a ton of different materials in here it's also got some other tools built in like his new decal placement which I may talk about in a separate video so this gives you the ability to not only add materials but also decals so for example say that I wanted to add one of these built-in decals there's a ton of them in here we'll go with maybe the other for right now but let's say I wanted to add this onto this surface I could go ahead I could click on ADD decal and then I can place it on this object and then from there it's going to be adjustable with different settings other things like that up so you can go into the geometry node settings and adjust things like the roughness also add things like damage to the decals as well okay so next up we've got material like metallic is kind of like the opposite of Sanctus library in the sense that it has a collection of materials I don't remember how many it's got 370 plus materials in here these materials are all PBR based so while Sanctus library is all procedural and allows you to add damage and things like that these are more based or these are more built um just as PBR images so you get access to this library but also then the different tool sets that are in here as well so material look is going to have this collection of materials and it's got all your settings set up right here using sliders so you can adjust things like the mapping for example so notice how if I bring that mapping up and down the material is going to change it also does things like texture bombing so when you do texture bombing with that's going to do and let's scale this way out just so you can see what texture bombing is going to do is you can see how this you can see how this kind of still tiles a little bit well the texture bombing what that's going to do is that's going to basically take this object and it's going to kind of rotate it so the tiling doesn't happen it's got options in here for things like the diffuse map but where I find this one really valuable is for setting up things like displacement so if I scroll down for example there's a tool in here where if I click on ADD displacement it's going to give me the ability to add a subdivision surface modifier as well as a displacement modifier in here and the Adaptive subdivision well when you do that and you can't see it right here we have to jump over into rendered mode and hopefully my uh hopefully my screen recorder doesn't crash when I do this but if I jump over into rendered mode and so notice how that comes in here and that actually applies all of that stuff right it does all the subdivision it does everything you need to get the displacement in here so instead to be having to mess around with UV mapping and nodes and other things like that this just gives me the ability to kind of do that it just kind of does all of that for me so it gives me the ability to set up those materials quickly and easily so it does also have asset browser integration allowing you to use the asset browser to manage these materials alright so real-time materials for blender is an add-on from ducky 3D you might be familiar with ducky 3D from his popular YouTube channel if you're not following him on YouTube you definitely should be subscribed to his channel because he has some great tutorials teaching you how to do different things but in particular this tool is tool somewhat similar to sync this Library it just does a different collection of procedural materials so this one has over 290 procedural materials everything from different kinds of cloths different paints Leathers other things like that they're all adjustable directly inside of blender and one thing I would say with these is a lot of them seem like they might be a little bit lighter than some of sanctus's materials beyond that they're just different materials is really what it is right so he's got a whole collection of materials that you can drop in drop on top of things and blender really quickly um so one thing that's cool about this one is it does have this little menu over here on the right hand side where you can adjust things like the scale of the wood grains the stretch of the wood grains other things like that so each one of these is going to have its own stuff its own information and then these do have all of the different nodes set up to support them so you've got things like displacement you can adjust the roughness other things like that so these are all fully adjustable materials ready to go in blender and he does have some really cool like lighted and also sci-fi materials in here as well so if you're looking for some of those like hexagonal materials that kind of thing this has those inside of it as well alright so we've also got real wood textures real wood textures is um I wouldn't say Niche but it's specific right so this is a really detailed add-on containing a bunch of different wood textures so there's 123 different textures and here they are all PBR meaning that you're not having to deal with the performance hit of having a procedural material and basically what it is is you've got all of these different kinds of wood in here right so it's got a bunch of exotic Woods American Woods European woods so really a deep collection of woods and so these have asset browser compatibility but you can use them to drop Woods into your scene really quickly and it's nice having these based on real world Woods right so notice how I can just drop those in really quick and so they're really easy to apply to objects but then if you jump into the Shader setup you've got the ability to add different finishes right so you can add a varnish you can add like an oiled finish or a glossy finish depending on what you're trying to do right because Woods can look really different depending on the actual finish that's on so you can also adjust the strength of the normals in order to make these look rougher and more bumpy or more smooth and you also have the ability to apply a color to it like it's painted wood so it'll maintain the normals while at the same time taking that pink color so if you're looking for a wood materials add-on this is a pretty deep detailed add-on for Woods okay so if you're trying to do materials for like cloth um that that's kind of a different animal right because cloth materials act a little bit different like not only do materials not only do cloth materials have texture sometimes they have fuzz on them sometimes they have wear they just they have wrinkles in order to make them more realistic it's just kind of different right well simply material is a tool that's designed from the creator of Simply cloth in order to help you create realistic materials inside a blender and so the cool thing about simply material is what it does is it allows you to pick different pattern but then you can also add micro textures and over light textures so the micro texture is going to give higher resolution detail if this had like different uh different threads in it or something like that and then the overlay texture adds wrinkles or folds so in addition it's also got the ability to add things like fuzz so if you want to add fuzz to like sweaters or other things like that this is a great tool for that and it's really easy to use all you do is once you understand the overlays you just select different base textures so like for example say that I didn't want this uh awesome Christmas look say that I wanted something else maybe let's go with this red texture right here notice I can add that in here but then I can also add the micro texture in here now what the micro texture is going to do is it's going to set what the actual material in the background looks like so notice how when I adjust this and it's a little bit difficult to see right here but when I adjust this this is setting up kind of a micro texture in the background that makes the cloth look like different kinds of cloth right so they all look a little bit different but then you can also add an overlay texture and what the overlay texture is going to do is it's going to make it look wrinkled so notice how if I add this in here this is going to apply wrinkles to this object so you can also come in here and you can make adjustments to things like colors so I could toggle this color on and off I can make changes to the way the color looks by adjusting the color ramp so if I was to bring this down notice how I can adjust the contrast between the different colors you can just make a ton of different adjustments to your cloth materials so if you are looking for a tool specifically designed to do cloth and blender this one is a great fit so sometimes modeling detail can be a lot of work in 3D and it's a lot easier to just use a decal and so in decal is basically a flat image that allows for detailing without adding additional geometry in here so decal machine is probably the most detailed tool for creating decals for blender and notice what it does is it takes these 2D images and it kind of like fakes 3D but in a way that looks really realistic just by placing decals on objects so there's a ton of stuff contained inside of decal machine and so most of the decals or most of the detail on this you can kind of see them when we jump over into shaded mode but these are decals but then if I come in here and I look at them they look 3D so this looks really detailed without me having to add all that geometric detail so adding decals is really easy you just tap the D key and you can just add whatever you want so say I wanted to add like a latch right here I can just add that in here you can scale it down and I can move it around and it's going to work along that surface so um you can also take it and let's go ahead and let's move it closer to this Edge but you can also take this and use it to apply detail to a surface that's curved so if I take this decal tap the D key and then I project it notice what it's going to do it's going to project it and it's going to bend it along that surface so you can also get it back and then make an adjustment so I could like move this down or something like that and I can project it again and it's going to project on that surface right here these decals are also adjustable so if I was to select the option for adjust notice how I can adjust like the height above face or um my favorite my favorite is The Parallax so if you adjust the Parallax in here notice what that's doing so that's using the camera in order to make this look like it's three-dimensional so there's a ton of stuff that you can adjust and change inside a decal machine it's a great tool for quickly adding details so clado is a tool specifically designed to um create materials that look like clay so it adds things like cracks and fingerprints and other things like that so this is definitely more of a stylized I wouldn't necessarily say Niche but kind of Niche tool but it does a really good job of simulating these different materials so it comes with a bunch of different nodes in here that makes customizing them really easy as well as tools for creating procedural um clay letters as well so the way this one works is it just comes as a library right so you can see how each one of these has a different kind of procedural clay associated with it and you can see how there's a ton of different stuff that you can adjust in here so you can just like the roughness of the material as well as giving you the ability to adjust like the scale of the fingerprint so if you wanted this to look like it had been handled more other things like that this tool has all the tools built in in order to do this so and you can see how you can make the cracks kind of rougher give them a little more detail um kind of whatever you want inside of this tool but then you've got all of these different materials all designed to kind of do the same thing which is to simulate the clay right so you can adjust like the color of the finger scales on here other things like that and so you've also got a tool in here designed to let you designed to let you simulate letters in here and create them as more of like a clay type situation so like for example you can adjust the spacing between the letters you can adjust the overall width you can adjust the character spacing in here if you want the letters to be closer together or further apart this is specifically designed to do that clay simulation in here and so then in here you can adjust the different colors you can also use this on images and so you've also got the ability what this does is this takes SVG files and it can simulate clay using those SVG files as well so if you want to create like clay icons or other little clay images you can do that from within this tool as well alright so if you've worked with polyhaven before you know it gives you access to a large library of materials hdris and textures all a hundred percent for free so you've got all of these in here and ready to go but you do have to download them one at a time now if you are interested in supporting these guys but also getting those materials all built directly into blender you can check out the polyhaven asset browser this is basically an asset browser that contains the entire library of different materials that are contained inside of polyhaven it also includes the hdris the PBR texture sets and their models so you get access to the entire library and it's built into the asset browser so for example you can see how we've got all the different textures in here but then we've also got things like the models so if you want to bring any of these models in from that Library you can just drag them in and you can see how you get access to that entire library of models as well as materials so this is just a faster easier way to access something that is available for free there's nothing saying that you can't download those PBR textures and then bring them in manually but if you do want to set that up quickly and not have to worry so much about it you can definitely just get this asset browser and have those ready to go in blender all right then grunge it is a tool specifically designed to create wear and tear in your model and if you look at this this one is about as close to free as the author can get it he's got it set at 51 cents which is the lowest price he could set on blender market so this is basically free but basically what you can do is you can use it in order to quickly add wear and tear to your models so um it can add things like cracks and edgeware and other things like that and it's really simple so all you have to do is just select an object right I'm going to tap the N key I'm going to find the grunge it tool and there's a number of different things that you can select in here so things like the scale of the edgeware which you can adjust in the node setup once you add this but you just select a model click on apply grunge it and so there's a few things that you can look at here like which nodes it wants to use that kind of thing that's going to add wear and grunge to your model now you are going to have to come in here and adjust some things right so like for example I'd probably want to bring is global control down in order to adjust the amount of wear that's being added to this object I would say you don't get a massive amount of damage control like you would with maybe some other tools but at the same time you can download this one and be using it for practically for free just add that dirt and grunge where in here I'm gonna bring my metallic down to zero I'm going to bring my uh my Global control down like this but again we can use these sliders to adjust the randomness support that appears other things like that one thing I haven't been able to figure out is if you can control where this occurs I may just be doing something wrong in here but um you seem kind of limited to wherever it puts this and it doesn't really seem to give you a whole lot of additional control but that may be something that's in here and I'm just not able to find but for 51 cents or whatever it is in the blender Market sale it's definitely worth downloading and playing around with alright so leave a comment below let me know if there's anything I left off the list remember that a bunch of these are currently on sale in the blender market Spring sale which I'll link to on this page but as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this and I'll catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The CG Essentials

Views: 18,522

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, blender 2.9, blender 2.91

Id: PHt9GrLjtsU

Length: 18min 33sec (1113 seconds)

Published: Wed May 03 2023