The secret of REALISTIC TEXTURES | Material channels explained

[Music] today we're talking about materials and how to make them look like the one you just saw what's the difference between material and texture material is a set of properties that defines basic stuff like objects color blurriness shininess transparency a texture is a pattern of any kind that breaks up the uniform and perfect look of the material would Rock cloth and this happens to be first tip for you always consider adding textures to your material in real world nothing is perfect but don't go crazy think about which parts of your scene will be visible to viewer and only add details if it's really necessary realistic textures usually equals high res textures the responsible use of which will lead to unnecessary long render times consider this in the beginning or you will have to optimize your scene later let's talk about what material consists of but before we proceed keep in mind that I'm using octane render engine for cinema 4d and this means that my material editor interface might be different to yours concept of materials creation process as well as interface structure is similar pretty much across all the software's so material consists of diffuse channel which is basically your color or photo or whatever you do yourself specular channel defines materials shininess it helps specify which areas of material are more reflective and which areas are less reflective roughness channel kind of specifies which areas of the material are rough or worn or blurry bump channel adds some details to your materials however the effect it gives is fake it creates an illusion of surface and evenness but in reality it does not affect geometry in any way it uses greyscale to pull details up or down usually a bit grayscale image is used white areas pulls details up grace gray areas leaves surface kind of untouched black areas pulls details down next channel is called normal it's similar to bump but it works differently as I already mentioned a bump map uses grayscale values to provide either up or down information a normal map uses RGB that corresponds directly with X Y and z-axis in 3d space and it basically tells software how this particular material should be shaded so this channel doesn't really do anything with geometry as well but it creates illusion of highly detailed geometry and this is a very important thing when it comes to scene optimization decent normal maps are baked inside 3d software and basically are like a 3d scan of a highly detailed mesh on a 2d texture we won't use any normal Maps today because I'll be showing you how to create decent textures using photoshop only displacement maps are king in detailing love resolution meshes these maps are actually affecting geometry usually with CPU render engines traditional render engines geometry has to be subdivided in order to displacement to appeal properly octane can displace any mesh doesn't matter how subdivided it is and I can use textures up to 8k which is crazy displacement maps can be either be baked from highly detailed mesh or painted manually which allows you to be super creative similar to bump map displacement map consists of grayscale values but in case of displacement map it will benefit from 16-bit or 32-bit image it's hard to be displacement map results but it comes with a price of longer render times you should always wait the expense of displacement map against data benefit before using one sometimes you'll just get the same look as from normal orb and map for this tutorial I went out to find interesting places and objects like asphalt walls fences tarmac surfaces I will take high-res pictures of some of these objects and we will turn it into material whenever you're taking photos of things that you want to turn into materials make sure that the weather is cloudy because you want light as flat as possible Sun is producing quite heavy shadows and this is not what you want in your textures yes [Music] I found a nice piece of basketball right here so this is like a really really old road mark paint which i think will look awesome with all the details in it now I will show you what has to be done to photo before it can be turned into high-end material let's open Photoshop and bring our photo up I was taking several images of same surface stepping one step right or left and I was doing it to get bigger resolution now I need to merge and stitch those photos together and Photoshop has a brilliant feature for that just click file ultimate photo merge in the pop-up dialog I usually choose perspective and as I already have all the files opened I click Add open files ok and now Photoshop is basically trying to you merge all those photos together alright processive is finished but I feel that my asphalt texture is quite a bit kind of distorted by perspective so I need to correct that I'll just use regular transform tool and drag coroners around then I'm cutting out the piece that I want to use and post produce here it is look how detailed it is I can literally see every single rock and dent in the road mark paint we also have some trash in there which I would like to take out they don't want this in here I'm using a Spot Healing Brush tool after cleanup is finished I'll duplicate that layer go to transform flip horizontal and the reason for that is that I want this texture to be kind of seamless I will cut away a part of the image and then I will start to just erase areas that I don't want and now I will do a basic color correction just to you proof colors a bit all right I will put all this stuff into one folder and we'll call this diffuse now I will duplicate that folder and call it black bump and we will start to creating her bump map as we already know bump map is grayscale so I will add black and white filter alright that looks all right I will duplicate my bump map and call the created folder specular now we will work on our specular channel I assume that this road mark paint is a bit more shiny that the rest of the asphalt and I also think that whenever it's raining water stays on a bottom of asphalt texture how do I explain it so water is not on top of rocks so I invert the texture so that more reflective areas are below rocks surface and I think this area here has to be more reflective as it would be more wet okay now it's time to create our displacement map I want displacement map to be more even in terms of deformations distribution so I will try to even out that color here on top I don't want it as bright as it was an original one look how much details we have here and 3d software will actually use all these data to modify actual geometry that's all folks I left a link below in the description where you can buy this material with all the textures for one dollar use it in your works commercial personal whatever tag me in your work because I would love to see what your guys are creating there are also a lot of premade textures available cheap ones expensive ones even 3d scanned ones like these but I always think that custom made texture for your particular project is better of course it takes more time and effort but that's what makes you stand out extra effort one last tip for you guys and this is not something skills related every time I'm working on material I'm trying to kind of feel it this asphalt material it actually feels like asphalt like a wet asphalt for sure but here is another example I love robots and this was my first ever created robot have a look at the texture it's body feels like heavy painted steel and that was the feel I was after if by whatever reasons you don't feel right about your material spend a bit more time trying to convince your feelings about it trust me it's worth it this will bring your works from this level to this also don't forget that the lights are affecting your materials dramatically if you don't feel right about your material try to play with lights first here it is guys the secret of realistic textures is in manual craft and understanding of what each channel is doing and when exactly you need to use it you have to be clever about using these things in the little scene I created for this tutorial I wanted to showcase as much details as possible so I used bump I use specular I use displacement but let's say I would I would want to create a more master shot and my camera would have to be further away that way I would definitely won't use displacement map and I probably would take my father differently from a drone or from a roof and in CG seen from distance it would look real as well without any other complicated details in it this tutorial was more about textures rather than materials themselves because there are many more ways of creating materials for instance in octane render there are mixed materials that allows you to add stuff that would interact with edges of your job tree and cinema4d itself you can drop textures and materials on top of each other this thing allows you to be super creative as usual I hope you learned something new should I even mention subscribe to my channel if you haven't already please

Channel: Andrey Lebrov

Views: 622,743

Rating: 4.9501848 out of 5

Keywords: lebrov, cg, vfx, tutorial, c4d, octane, photoshop, texture, material, realistic, how to, shading, lighting, rendering, realism, workflow, high resolution, 3D, graphics, photorealistic, improve, skills, learning, step up, develop, secret, fast

Id: a8d6p-E4KSE

Length: 12min 36sec (756 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 23 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/blazer965]

I purchased this material actually and am trying to recreate the nice wet look that's visible in the first frame. Any tips as to what I should be doing with lighting etc?

The file comes with a Specular, Displacement, Diffuse and Bump map. I'm attaching to the Diffuse, Specular Color, Displacement and Bump slots. Should I be using Spec Color instead?

[u/Jmarrossi]

The guy literally explains how to make it step by step, why would you purchase it?