Top 6 Blender Nodes To Make Any Material in Blender 2021

hello i'm chris bailey and i am a blender youtuber over at see bailey film and today i'm doing this tutorial with cg cookie we're going to be showing you the top six nodes that you need to make any material in blender let's check it out now don't forget to check out cgcookie.com we've got an amazing collection of tutorials and resources there for you to check out you can sign up with a free account today to get started so here's my sphere i'm going to go ahead and click new under the material tab to create a new material on it and automatically it's creates the beginning which is the principle bsdf shader and the material output so what are our five notes well first off we're going to talk about the texture coordinate node now to find any of these nodes you just shift a to get your search panel up and type in the name of the item in the search so i'm going to type in the texture coordinate node the texture coordinate is great for positioning textures onto your 3d object if you've got uvs that you've laid out this is how you can access them by default blender uses the generated texture coordinate and we're going to see in a minute how this is going to be powerful and how we can use it to unlock some really cool material properties the next material node that we're going to talk about is the color ramp node [Music] now the color ramp node is one of the most fundamental ways to put color into your material but it's also a great way to begin to manipulate other things like textures now all you do is you can create your color ramp i'll just show you basically plug it into the base color here of my object and i can drag these around but you can see that it's just uniformly changing the color of my sphere however if i choose to use one of these coordinates it's going to actually help place it so if i place the generated into the factor here you can see that i can start to get some specific control where i'm getting the gradient to appear on my object itself so you can make some really interesting stuff just with this alone the next node we're going to talk about is the noise texture node let's take a look the noise texture node does what it says it generates noise if we take a look at it i plug it straight into the base color of my principle bsdf shader you can see we're getting a noise pattern i can change the scale i can change the detail and the roughness to get all kinds of variation now distortion is a great value as well for creating water-like effects to begin to distort and twist the image it starts to become really effective when you plug it into something like a color ramp so if i take my color ramp here and put it here in between the noise texture and the principle bsdf i can also plug in my generated which is what it's doing already by default and now i've got a really interesting looking shader and you can see by using the color ramp i can crunch down and eliminate sections of this noise or allow more of it to come through if you come all the way down on your detail and your roughness you're going to get these really nice kind of amorphous blob type shapes and if you come over to your color ramp and switch from linear interpolation to something like constant you're going to get a real hard edged look to get really interesting cartoon effects the next note we're going to look at is the veroni texture [Music] the voronoi or vironai or voronorinori texture is really really exciting because you can create some fantastic shapes with it similar to the noise texture it's a generative procedural texture so blender is creating a noise pattern and using it to create the material now if i replace my noise texture here in this chain with the voronoi i can plug the distance in i can plug the color or the position all of these are going to give me different results plus i've got quite a few drop downs let me show you some of the cool things you can do with it if i plug my distance into my color ramp and i switch this back to ease we'll be able to see what it's actually doing you can get this initial kind of cellular pattern with the voronoi it's a really cool look you can create some nice organic shapes but what's also really handy is you can switch from euclidean to manhattan to get more of a square shape or you can come over to chebychev turn down random and you can see you start to get these really nice grid lines now if you don't want to have the layout circular like this the sphere actually comes with its uvs already laid out if you use the default sphere so if i use the uv as the vector into my voronoi you can see that it actually lays it out like a grid and then i can switch this to something like constant or i can bring these really close together to get a nice grid pattern look and this is really helpful for making things like tiles or bricks one thing that's really cool is if i switch down to the minkowski you have the exponent value that you can change and the exponent value c actually changes these shapes and so you can get rounded squares and this is really great for making things like bathroom tiles if you increase the randomness and turn it right up things start getting really random with this shader and you begin to see how much is possible with it the next node we're going to look at is the mix rgb node now the mix rgb note does what it says it mixes it mixes two different types of color but it can also mix other things as well let's take a look so first i'm going to grab this up here and i'm going to stick it in between the veroni and the color ramp now i can take my noise texture and i can plug this into the other color and now this slider allows me to transition between these two materials you can see you can get nice hybrid effects where both of them are actually affecting our color ramp now there are all kinds of combination modes you can multiply color burn light and screen just like you can in a photo manipulation software like or photoshop these different color mix effects allow you to have a lot of control over how things are combined another really exciting way to use the mix rgb is actually to bring it over before the texture coordinate node so if i was to duplicate this with shift d and bring it right up here to the let's say the voronoi texture and i can take a noise texture now and i can place this into the factor of the other color and what this is going to do is it's going to distort the way this voronoi texture is placed on my sphere because remember the texture coordinate node tells blender how to place textures so if you start mixing values into here you're basically mixing the placement of a texture you can really see some really cool results the last node we're looking at is the bump node the bump node can take any black and white value and turn it into height map information for blender in order to simulate more geometry than you really have i'm going to take this system here that we've just created but instead of piping it into this color ramp i'm going to create another color ramp i'll stick it right here before the bump node and i'll bring this color into the factory now let me show you what this looks like i'll just plug it first into the base color to replace this one so you can see it it's just a black and white image now i'm going to take this black and white image and i'm going to plug it into the height value of my bump node and then i'll take the normal output and plug it into the normal of my shader the normal refers to the direction that polygons are facing so basically we're pretending there are more polygons here than there really are and we're changing the way they all face with this height map being translated into a normal i plug my color back into the base color and now you can see it looks like we have extra geometry on our object quite a crazy texture you can back off the strength to get a nice in-between effect if you don't want it to be too strong or if you're playing around with a color ramp you can actually control different sections by cutting areas out with the color ramp or change the value instead of pure black and pure white if you come to more gray tones it's going to soften up your bump it won't make it quite as strong now as a final touch i'll just talk through what are the things you need to know about the principle bsdf in order to really kind of land your material now we've got quite a few values that you can mess around with but the main ones to focus on are your base color which sets the color for your object subsurface which allows it to be a translucent material and i'll demonstrate that in a moment metallic which can make your material look like it's made of metal you can see if i drag this up it looks like it's made of metal now very straightforward specular which affects how much the highlights are visible how much highlight there is based on the lights roughness which is a very important one this one determines how much your material reflects the environment it closer gets to zero the more like a mirror it becomes the higher it goes the closer to one the more it spreads the light out and blurs any reflections the last two that are i think most important to know about are emission and emission strength emission allows you to cause your shader to glow so by plugging my color ramp into the emission you can see that it begins to cause it to emit light if i turn up the strength it's going to glow hotter and hotter and those are the top six nodes that you need to know to make any kind of material in blender thanks so much for watching this tutorial what do you think of the top six material nodes to make any kind of shader in blender let us know in the comments you might disagree with what we've picked i'm curious to find out what you would do to make any material thanks for checking this out i'll catch you in the next tutorial see ya

Channel: CG Cookie

Views: 270,600

Keywords: blender tutorial 2021, 3d modeling for beginners, blender 3d modeling tutorial beginner, Blender tutorial, blender tutorial 2.9, blender tutorial 2021, blender beginner tutorial 2021, blender material tutorial, blender nodes, make any material

Id: yffWd4kI51Q

Length: 9min 35sec (575 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 09 2021