Easy Felt Material | Blender 3.0

welcome guys to another blender tutorial and today i'm going to be showing you how to make a simple felt material in blender we're going to be making a procedural material and then on top of that we're going to be adding two particle systems it's as easy as you can get and i'm going to be keeping it super simple i've been using this felt shader for a few of my character projects and it works pretty well i think you could probably do it better if you use some more advanced setups and stuff but i'm trying to keep it simple i think this kind of look even at my look 100 like real felt it just has a nice look to it i really like it as a material so i'm going to get into a tutorial and i hope you guys enjoy and by the way if you guys want to check out some of my skillshare stuff i'm going to put a link in the description below i've got some awesome courses on there and you can actually get it for free for one month if you're new if you haven't been on skillshare if you follow my link so you can decide if you want to stay after one month and you're not obligated to do that if you want to check that out it's free feel free to check it out so let's get into it so go on over and jump in blender i'm going to be using blender 3.0 as a demonstration and what we're going to be doing is we're going to just be selecting the default cube it just comes with blender and let's go over to our modifiers and let's just give this a subdiv modifier and let's just give it something like 4 in the viewport and in the render let's just make it something like five if you don't want that just to be as a modifier you could just you know apply it but i'm just doing this as a demonstration so i'm not really too worried about the modifier so if that's still active just right click and then go sheets move so now we have a nice smooth ball just makes a really good object for trying this out so let's grab just the other two items let's just delete them so just these guys x and delete those two hit one to go into your front or graphic view so in our front author as you can see up here we're going to go shift a let's just add in a camera and let's go g y move it back and i'm just going to go to my camera settings make it a focal length of 120 and i'm just going to go to my output and i'm going to make it 1080 at the top on the x resolution and now i'm going to go g y and just move it back now if i hit zero that camera active we can see this right so you know just position your camera something like this it's just a good little uh setup for testing this out so let's go um first of all let's go to our renderer here let's just make the render cycles we're going to be working with cycles and let's go to the device let's make it a gpu and let's also come here to the denoising render and let's make that optics so that'll work really well by the way if you don't have a gpu don't worry about it you can still do it with cpu it'll be fine gpu obviously does render a little bit faster okay so let's add in some lights right shift a let's just go let's keep it simple simple area light move that up and let's just go to our light settings uh size of two works really well for this and i find it 120 is a good strength on the watts here and we're gonna go z render it and let's see what that looks like okay that's nice but let's just go to the right author by hitting free rotate it a bit and move it back and this is actually going to be acting as our rim light so i really like rim lights when it comes to testing this sort of particle stuff it just helps the little particles stand out especially towards the edges so you can select both those lights in your front view you can go shift d and then r and just have it like that so now you know if you're going to camera see you have this nice lighting there but what we can also do is just grab one of these lights and shift d to duplicate it rotate it in towards the ball whatever thing here and now you can see we have that so that should be fine right we don't have to over complicate it let's go control b or command b in camera view click and drag over the camera and that actually just limits the render to the viewport um at the moment we don't really have a scene or any other items in our in our viewport so it doesn't really like interfere too much but if you had like a really large scene just having like it more restricted to the camera view for rendering it really helps just free up your computer a little bit and just makes things run a little bit smoother so let's select our ball over here and let's just go over to our shading works now by default it already has a material because we used our default cube so just make sure to go into your camera view hit z and then go render it and you can now see your ball so let's go to work here with the principal shader it's super simple let's start by getting a generator so we're gonna go shift a and let's just go over to our textures and let's just add in a noise texture so we're just adding in a basic noise texture and that's gonna be generating our textures let's go color and plug it into the base color see here we have that now what we do want to do is add in a texture coordinate so we're just going to go shift a search and just type in texture and let's get a let's just scroll down and get that texture coordinate now let's take the object and plug it into the vector and now it knows how we want to distribute it and let's go to the scale and let's just make something like 12. now obviously this depends on what you're working with so keep that in mind if you've got a you know different size object especially haven't applied the scale you may have to tweak these values a little bit more so you know something between 12 and 15 works good now by default it has this kind of rainbowy effect we kind of don't want that so let's just get a color ramp to make that a black and white value so let's go shift a and just click search if you just type in color you can get a color ramp just simply place that one on this cable here the noise texture and the principle just right snug between those two and let's just drag the values here closer together just to make it a little bit more contrasty and you can see this is what we have here but let's also come here to our detail and let's up that to nine and let's also come here to the distortion and drag that up as well so we kind of have something that looks like that and then you can come here again just kind of tweak these okay don't overdo it at the moment let's grab these two notes here g to move them over and now we're gonna go shift a search and let's get a mix rgb so grab a mix rgb and place it here just make sure the color ramp actually goes into the factor and now you get these two colors here so i'm going to make the top one um let's just make it slightly grayish and one underneath it we're just going to make even less of gray so what we can do later instead of messing around with these you kind of have your contrast set here but you can come over here and then adjust these by making them different colors and that's how you can control your color okay so for now we just have this here and let's come to the roughness and this is update because felt does not have a lot of reflectivity now obviously in and of itself this doesn't really look like felt but it's a really good base material to help us when we so now let's go over to our particles and while we have this sphere active simply just click on the plus and we don't want it to be an emitter so let's just click on hair click on advanced and with the hair length short is going to be the best here so let's make it point one okay maybe even shortest make it point zero five nice and short like that so these by the way are just our parent particles so at the moment that's set to thousand let's make it 600 and just to make things a little bit more efficient we're not really going to be seeing behind the cube here so let's get our face select and just select the back face go to our particles go to our object out of properties over here and let's go to our vertex group hit plus and then just in fact select everything and then just assign that then just select the back face and then with that group active just remove it so now if we go over to our particles and we go down to our vertex groups and we go to density we can select that group and now in object mode we're not having it we're not having any particle placement because we didn't select those vertices to be active or added to our group so back into camera view and let's now come over here down to the children and let's make it interpolated now by the way just all the parent number is here the number here that's our parents it just means instead of having to you know like work with every individual hair having kind of like this parent-to-child relationship just allows you to have these parent particles and each parent particle will be generating a certain amount as you can see over here so in the display that's just what you see in the viewport the final render amount is usually higher and the reason we don't set the display amount to the same it'll just be insanely dense in the viewport which isn't really going to help you so make sure to set the render to something like 60 and the display amount to something like fruity should be fine don't overdo it to start with we can still come here to this hair length and just make it even a little bit less so nice and short and now let's go over to our render here and let's just come here and enable b-spline that's important and also under the children here we want to come down to roughness and we want to make sure this doesn't just look perfectly straight we want to give this a lot of roughness so come here to the end point value drag that up and then come here to the shape drag that up a little bit and you can see what's happened it's randomizing that a little bit and we also want to come here to the random for the size but don't mess around with that too much we're going to do that with the second particle system so now if we hit z and we go rendered we can see this is what we have so far okay don't worry too much about it looking a bit sparse because we are going to work with that later on in the final render so let's just go back into solid view and i might actually just go to the children amount here and bump it up to 45 just because my computer can handle it but if you're working with a laptop or something you can just keep the display amount low as long as that render amount is at least 60 that'll be okay so i'm also going to come here to the viewport display and just make the strand steps free that's always going to make it look a little bit better in the viewport display so now we have that working out let's go over here to our particles and if we were to actually just render this right now i'll just quickly give you an example so you can understand if we were just to render this you can see very clearly that it looks very uniform there's not all these little hair scraggly hair bits coming out which really kind of is something you see when you look at felt and that's what we're trying to go for that's where we're going to be creating a second particle system on top of this to kind of help with that look so let's just hit escape to stop that render and close this window and what we're going to do instead of doing all of that hard work again we're simply going to come here with that particle system active we're going to drop down here and go duplicate particle system and i'm going to click on the second particle system and just click that little 2. that's very important now that's its own particle system and let's just call it 2 so that's our second particle system and what we're going to do we'll come to this number here for the parents and make it 120 and we're also going to come to our children and in the viewport let's make that 12 and in the render let's make that 20. okay so that's what we have there and now if we come over here up to the length for that second particle system we're gonna go to the hair length and just increase that and now you can see we have those second hairs like that so now if we quickly give that a test render we should see the difference okay so you can see now that's looking quite a lot better it's got a bit more of a fluffy feel to it but it still doesn't look quite like felt so what we're going to do is just adjust a few things so with the original particle system okay make sure just like the original particle system we're just going to come over here to the length and make that hair length even shorter and i'm going to go over to our children here and under the roughness we're going to increase that roughness here at the top so drag that value up over here not too much just a little bit and then also this one here the endpoint value okay there we go and hit z go render it and let's see what that looks like in the viewport okay let's just put the uniform here to the uniform to zero and let's now grab the second particle system let's come up here to the second particle system and let's just make it less i'm going to make it 50 and i'm going to come here to the children i'm going to make it eight in the viewport and let's just make it eight as well in the render okay so let's have a look z rendered let's see what it looks like and let's also come up here to the length for that second particle system and just make that a little bit shorter as well and let's also just go down to that under the children let's just go and increase that end point value here as well just to make it a little bit more scraggly okay bring that rough the hair length down just a little bit don't overdo it let's have a look at that okay it's looking a little bit better okay let's give that a test render quickly okay we've made it just a little bit too short there so let's just quickly grab the first particle system just increase that hair length just a bit and we're just going back and forth till we get it just right okay so the length is a little bit better but we just still need to if that first particle system just come down here and increase that for some reason i've set it down to zero the end point let's just make sure that's got enough there okay that looks a lot better so now let's just give that a render and there you can see we have a much better looking felt material here and it looks really rough like it's not as smooth looking as felt but this is kind of like really close up so if you were actually applying this to something like a model you'd be seeing it a lot um further away you wouldn't be seeing it close up like this so the scale here is quite small but that is looking like a much more realistic felt material so now we can do that we have this felt kind of established we have that felt feel we can now go and just try out these colors so let's just go into our rendered mode here and let's just try out some different colors so i'm going to make it maybe like a nice green and grab this bottom one make that like a green almost kind of similar and let's just i'm also just going to go to my particles grab that second particle system and i'm just going to increase the length just a little bit and then i'm also going to come down here to under the children under the roughness and just bring that end point value down just a bit to maybe .05 so it's not quite as intense and maybe i'll bump the render up to 12. over here in the display and in the render as well saturate that green a little bit more and let's just bring the spruffness bring this roughness value down just a little bit okay let's give that a render and there we have it that is our felt material it actually looks a lot better now it has some color to it but you can kind of get the idea this is how we can really simply and easily make felt so um if you guys have found this tutorial interesting i'll make these blend files here available on my patreon so you guys can check it out this is a simple simple felt material so i hope this has been a useful thing i hope you guys are able to use it for some of your projects and yeah that's it really really simple to make a material like this i'll see you guys next time and have fun

Channel: PIXXO 3D

Views: 8,012

Keywords: Blender, Blender 2.83, Blender 2.9, blender felt material, Blender felt, Blender fabric tutroial, easy blender materials, Blender easy fabric, Blender 3.0, easy Blender tutorial, cg matter, southern shotty 3d

Id: tS_U3twxKKg

Length: 14min 40sec (880 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 23 2021