Tutorial No.67 : Creating Realistic Plastic Shader in Arnold for 3ds Max

[Music] thanks for watching new tutorial program + calm if you are interested in learning opportunity if not fundamentally please make sure to check out our company introduction to art or Portuguese math courses which is a massive eight hour long course you need to explore all the aspects of Arnold for 3ds max thoroughly okay folks we'll come back to mobile plus calm and in this lesson we'll learn how to create realistic plastic shaders in order for 3ds max this is going to be a series of free video tutorials in which we will be discussing developing realistic shaders in order for 3ds max and this is the first one so make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on Vimeo Facebook and Twitter to be informed about the new tutorials that we will be uploading and now we are not going to be talking about the fundamentals of for example the standard surface shaders or different shaders in Arnold for two years max we have already done that in our comprehensive introduction to Arnold for 3ds max so make sure to visit our website McGrath come and check that course out too if you are interested in learning the Arnold for 3ds max fundamentally ok folks so let's get started now in DC as you can see I have this plain model this toy that we are going to be using it as our main geometry and if I run the active shade you can see the main lighting is coming from this Arnold light in the scene which is an Arnold sky and if I turn it off as you can see we don't have any other light that affects both diffuse and specular contribution and in these are like I have used this HDR image from mastering CGI comte you if I open up my material editor this is the HDR a that we are using actually come here and stop the activeshade so this is a CRA that we are using for the liking of the scene you can find it on mastering to Joy desk on a you and also you can see we have these other two lives that are going to be used as are just adding a bit more specular highlights if I just turn up the first or no light that we have you can see we have these other two lights which are only having specular contribution and if I come down you can see the diffuse contribution for these lights has been set to zero okay and if I turn the map you can see they won't affect anything but the specular highlights and this can be very useful when we develop our shader so we can actually see how to develop our shaders and add a bit more detail now the for continuing here let's go ahead and actually take a look at some references and see how plastic look in real world so here is a very good example of plastic material in real world you can see we have this very nice beautiful highlight obviously the plastic has a base color component or diffuse component it's reflective now this reflection depending on the precise type of plastic that you are trying to create and recreate might be sharp like here or it might be matte and proper and if I compare these can see just go through this examples you can see we have different types of plastics rougher sharper depending on what you are trying to create but if I get back to this particular example here we obviously have a fairly strong funnel effect probably something like 1.6 or 1.7 40i or or different L reflectivity would be missus right here and if you take a look at this particular example that we have here we also have this kind of multi lobe specular reflections you can see if I just zoom in you can see we have this kind of sharper reflection and we also have this more diffuse more spread specular lobe underneath it and thanks to the new standard surface shader in Arnold five and the new coating layer that basically allows us to have two specular reflection layers in Arnold it's easy to recreate something like this now prior to Arnold five we actually had to do most of this work for example recreating the fernell recruiting this model of specular reflections manually and it was really labor-intensive but the new standard surface shader in auto-5 is really powerful and lets us do most of this automatically and it has some really great parameters to actually do most of this job also if you take a look at this surface for example if i zoom in here you can see the reflection that we see on this surface isn't straight we get this kind of waviness on the surface and that simply indicates that this surface isn't perfect and we have some distortion and some unevenness on it that we need to replicate with for example a bump map and also we have some smaller and more detailed unevenness if you take a look at these areas for example here or here for example and that needs to be basically associated with the bump map as well now we can take a look at more example here for example the funnel effect can be seen a bit better on this particular picture here you can see the reflection on the parallel faces are less strong compared to the reflections on the perpendicular angles or the edges you can see as we move away from this frontal faces toward the edges or from the parallel faces to our viewing direction to the perpendicular faces be a reflection becomes basically stronger or more even on the surface so we need to take that into consideration when we create our material and just going through some of this plastic shader so you can actually see them in this particular example you can see the unevenness on the surface is quite visible in this reflection you can clearly see we have this kind of larger level on on even as you can see this huge wave that these sorts are specular highlights that coming from this stuff but and also we have this kind of smaller more jagged unevenness that also presenting itself and obviously the specular roughness and the specular weight itself can be also manipulated and the control to the texture to just add a bit more variation we need to also do that when we create our shader if you want to be more and more realistic now another component of most classic materials is subsurface scattering now this subsurface scattering level can be very low or very high depending on the shader that you are trying to create for example you can see we have this obviously very obvious subsurface scattering look that if we try to recreate something like this we need to probably make sure we have a very strong subsurface scattering but in a case for example like this the subsurface scattering isn't that visible it's there but isn't that visible so depending on what you're trying to create you might need to actually add that subsurface scattering and have some subsurface scattering contribution from your standard surface shader okay now you can see in this particular example you can clearly see that most lobe reflections here and in this case we have this kind of scratches that also if we create something like this we need to add those scratches using our bond map and probably in our specular layers as well but you can see this one is a bit more mass so let's get started and create some plastic shaders in oil for 3ds max if I open up my material editor lets me select its plane object and currently it has a standard surface area let me delete that also let me delete this HDR image as we don't need it so let's go through material Arnold surface and select the standard surface right-click and assign it to the plane we can actually run the active shade here so the first thing I want to set is a base color and obviously you can use regular red blue and yellow colors or green colors that are used in different plastics but in this case I have is going to specific green color that I want to use for my base color okay and I'm probably to actually increase my active shade resolution maybe try something like 1000 and start a render again let's set our base color weights to about 1 and now the next important section here is the special are reflections and depending on the particular plastic that you are trying to recreate you can obviously control these well views in this case I would say probably something like point 25 would be a good specular wait for the look that we are after and now the roughness value obviously can control the sharpness of the shader in this case if I want to have a matte rougher look I can increase the roughness value to let's say something like point three and as you can see we are getting this matte look or I can use something like point zero five if I want to have a very very sharp specular reflection in this case you can probably maybe try something like point one and the oil are well view or the final reflectivity for something like plastic as I mentioned plastics have a very kind of strong for left back so probably something like 1.5 or one point six should work and if I just actually stop that now basically if you take a look at this example here you can clearly see the reflections are less visible in this frontal parallel faces to our viewing direction compared to these edges or perpendicular faces to our viewing directions and this is basically the final effect and we need to use the IR while you lot about 1.5 1.6 or this example can be also a nice example you can see obviously in these frontal faces the reflection is less visible compared to this very sharp reflections on these very edges as you can see or take a look at this section here you can see we have this very strong reflections but here the reflection isn't as strong and visible so that's why we need to have a panel of probably something like 1 point let's say 1.6 1.5 I'm going to go with an in-between value off 1.58 okay let's run the activeshade again so this can be your very basic plastic shader using Arnold standard surface shader but if you want to go to the next level and create something like this with all of these beautiful these details these multi low specular reflections this unevenness in this surface and also this one even is in the specular weight and specular roughness obviously you need to do a bit more so let's start actually making our plastic shader something like this a bit more detail a bit more realistic so let's get started now the first thing I want to talk about is obviously to create that multi lobe specular reflections we need to actually use our coating section of the standard surface shader alongside our specular reflection so we can use this specular reflection to simulate the rougher broader reflections that we see on the surface and we use our clear coat or coating section to actually add this sharper reflections okay so let's do that so for the specular reflection I'm going to use a roughness of about probably point 25 so fairly rough and it's going to be our base layer and then I know maybe something like point - that would be probably be better that's our base layer then we increase the clear coat wait if I just increased something like 1 I can clearly see we have this multi-layered specular reflection the base layer that is in control by the specular reflection is rougher and then we have this coat layer on top of it which has a weight of 1 and the roughness of 0.1 and it gives us this sharper layer of reflection in this case I'm probably going to use a clear coat wait I don't want it to be that visible something like point 15 and sharpness I wanted to be very sharp so I'm going to use a roughness value of something like 20 or 5 now as you can see we get this beautiful layer specular reflections the more spread rougher specular reflection is obviously coming from the specular reflection and we have these sharper reflections on top of that layer that is coming from our clear coat or our coating layer of the standard surface shader okay that's good now we want to basically make it a bit more realistic by introducing a bit more variation to our specular and cause weight and our specular and coat roughness so let's start introducing a bit more variation to the specular weight first and then color it and then we take a look at the specular and co2 roughness so now before that let's actually add a piece a or V so you can actually see how those layers would look so I'm going to just go to my render setting under a or V as you can see we have this coat and the specular ALV okay how can I please to remove this if I want to simply select the AO v type in this case EXR at the AO v file and let's calm down we want our codes a Ovie's and our start our special array Ovie's let's come up here for our code aov that would be probably enough for now so let's add them now let's start working on the specular weight and the code weight so if I just come here you can probably stop the active shape for now and just focus on the shader itself okay so right click and go to the maps general let's see the bitmap and I'm going to be loading this PW 19 dot PNG can start adding a bit more variation using this map okay now now one of the things that I do when actually working on shaders in Arnold is to try working with the standard surface shader itself before actually adding any particular texture to control different parameters now what I have done I have basically have a general idea of the specular weight and the specular water roughness and also the cold weight and the coat roughness so when I try to control this parameter with the texture I am also going to be trying to make sure that that texture has a volume that is closed to the walls view that I have already said in my parameters for example if you take a look at this particular image here you can see it has very dark and very bright value so if I directly connected to my specular weight parameter what's going to happen is that this very dark parts are going to have no reflections and these very bright parts are going to be very reflective and in this case the specular weight well you that we have used is about 0.25 and we need to make sure to adjust this texture to be around this wall use and not the current zero and one value that it has okay so also another thing that you can see the structure the majority of texture is black and we have some white smudges and scratches and stuff like that and we want to invert that because we want the majority of the surface to be reflective and then we want to have some scratches and dirt and imperfections on it that would have less reflection and that's why we need to actually invert this image so those imperfections would be black and therefore reducing this specular weight well when we connected to our specular weight parameter so let me just select the deep map here directly and come down to the output section and enable the color map here and what I'm going to do just we can invert the image obviously by replacing these two points and as you can see we have inverted the map but I don't want it to as you can see it's very bright and it's going to have a special are weight of one if we connect this very bright texture for specular we directly so I'm going to decrease these bright well used to probably something like twenty four in this case you know close to point 25 that was a specular weight originally and I don't want to have any dark spots so probably something like instead of point the original wall is zero which is going to get a very dark spot and therefore those very dark spots are not gonna be reflective at all in this case I don't want to have those dark spots I'm going to increase my to let's say about point zero five now those very dark spots aren't as dark as the floor so if it was zero we would have these very dark spots and therefore the surface wouldn't have any reflections on those particular dark spots that's not something we want we want at least some reflection so probably something like point zero five within up in this case okay let me just make this extra bit smaller and also I just want to see how this fixture is going to look so lets me connect it to something like the base color for now and show it in the viewport let me just increase the tiling to something like five and five just to get a bit more detail and let's try offsetting those that's probably something like this would be enough now if I connect this to the specular weights right now directly we are going to be obviously controlling our specular weight while you with this but I'm not going to do that for now what I'm actually going to do is to try to add a bit more detail to the specular weight map so that's why I'm going to add another map just to make the specular weight map a bit more complex but what we have before details so let's load another bitmap in this case let's use this point 0 1 and I want to multiply this image over the first one if I take a look at this image you can see their image is mostly black and with some white imperfections but we wanted inverted version of this texture because we want these kind of imperfections and smudges to have a darker color therefore when applied to this which'll are ways they would cause the surface to be less reflective right so that's why let's try to invert this image and so in the output section enable the color map set the first point to one and let's try adding a bit more detail probably need to add a point spout here and just want to see those dark spots back and so now we start to get them probably something like this wouldn't be too bad and just try to make sure you we're using the same well view for the y coordinate for this point as well point 463 so now you can basically multiply this map on top of our first map right let's use actually the same tiling for this map as well which was five and five let's just take a look at it with you port okay that's what we have just going to probably upset it Abed try point tool or points 45 okay that's good now in order to actually multiply these two we are going to be using a multiplying also map Arnold maths multiply node so there we go these are first input this is our second input I'll just make it smaller and if I wanted to see the result of this map directly in the viewport I can actually use a map to material so material Arnold utility map to material I'll just make it a bit bigger and if you connect that here so this is the result of the multiplying the second texture over or first texture so it's just going to be a bit more detailed compared to would just use the first sector okay let me just put this snaps of material out here now I'm not going to directly still use this multiply node and connect it to the specular weight and to the specular roughness because if you take a look at the shader the standard surface itself you can see the specular weight well used about point 25 and the clear coat well you is about point 15 so we need to actually have two versions of this map one which is a bit brighter for our specular weight because it's that that weight values a bit higher and one a bit darker for our code weight because you can see the well view is less than the specular reflection weight of you so in this case you can actually use what's called range map so if I just go to my maps or NAL's I think it's in the math section and here's the range map so what we can do is to define this multiply as the input okay probably going to be needing this as well just to see how that's not going to look when used with the range map so if I connect this range map to the texture map you can see now this is without any change for the specular weight well you can see the while you was about to point 25 and as I mentioned we need to stay true to this world use when you are actually trying to assign a texture to a particular value here so that's why I think the current value that we have here is a bit more than what one is a bit brighter than the 0.25 that we have so I'm just going to select the range map and instead of the 0 to 1 into 12 use I'm going to change them to probably something like 0.75 and it's making a bit darker and it connected to the scheduler with obviously it's going to be less reflective compared to if we connected our multiplying out directly to the specular wait well view and just so we avoid any very dark spots again let's use probably an input value of about 0.1 okay or let's 0.09 so something like this and now this can be our specular weight map okay so let's connect that to the specular weight and for the coat wait let me just shift drag this and we want darker version of this map so let's just make some space here so let me connect the range to the map to material just to see how it looks and as I mentioned because the codes wait well view is less than our specular wait well view that's why we are trying to darken this image so let's see probably something like 0.3 as you can see now it's darker we can use this to control our code weight okay so that's the first section of the material let's just run the activeshade so here is our render and as you can see we have this nice variations in our specular and code weight so if I check out my special array over you can see this nice subtle variations and if I take a look at the code a will be same thing is happening here is even though it's a bit subtler convert or specular weight map okay now what we're going to be trying to do is to basically add a bit more variation to the specular and the codes process so let me just get started with that I'll just make sure this masks are a bit smaller okay now for this particular roughness let's add another bitmap and this time use this PW 38 boards and you can obviously download the project files for this tutorial from our website the link it in the description so here's the map okay so I just click on add image this is enough that we're going to be using now if I take a look at this map if we connect this map directly to our specular rottenness the white parts are going to be very rough and the dark parts are going to be very sharp the range for the specular roughness that we have here is point two so we need to make sure that if we connect this texture to our special our roughness the wall views are true to that range in this case if I select the map here okay I just make it bigger and go to the output section what I'm going to do is to just simply enable the color map and set the first point to about point five point 15 and the second point to about point 25 so as you can see the point 25 is point five bigger than a point zero five bigger than point two and point 15 is point zero five smaller than point two so we are staying true to that point to schedule our roughness welding that we have defined in our standard surface trader and the resulting that would be something like this okay but instead of actually directly doing it in here what I'm going to do is to because I'm going to use the same map for my code process as well instead of doing it in the output section of the bitmap we can actually use a range map again so let's just go to our Arnold Maps math and load arrange map use this map as the input and change the output the input mean is 0 the input max is 1 now the output max would be something like point 15 and point 25 okay and if I just bring in another map tool material so you can just view it here as you can see the resulting map if I just stop the active shade here connect the map again as you can see the resulting that would be very similar to when we manually adjust the texture here okay so that's going to be our mat for the specular roughness and for the I just shift drag to range map and for the coat roughness if you remember the wall you for the coat roughness wats point zero five so we need to make sure that range is considered here so instead of point zero five for the output min let's try something like point zero 25 or point zero three and instead of point zero five for the put max just to add a bit more variation let's try point zero 75 or point zero eight and it is going to be the clear coat roughness map as you can see it's darker and this is going to result in a sharp particular right layer which is what we want for our coating contribution of the standard surface trader so let me just put this down for the moment and let's use the first one as our specular roughness and the second range map as our coat roughness okay let's just delete this and let's just increase the resolution of our active shades to something like 1280 and 720 and see what we're going to get just have my material open and run back to shade so here is our render and now we have both specular and collate and specular and cultural roughness variations and if I take a look at my specular AoE you can see we have this very beautiful variation in both facial our weight and specular roughness and this is our closed layer so we have this subtle variation on our code weight and codes a roughness as well okay let me get back to the RGB a pass again now another thing that we can add it obviously bump mapping if I take a look at this reference image as you can see we have this wavy uneven surface that is manifested in this way the highlight and we have also some other higher frequency details on the surface as well so we can replicate that using a noise texture and use another image to add a bit more detail to the bump mapping as well so first of all let me just come down here and let's use an Arnold noise and what I'm going to do again use the Matthew material just to see how this looks on the surface you can obviously connect that to base color attribute of our Center surface shader if you wanted to but this is just a bit easier let's just stop these active shades and select a plane and assign this natural material and select the noise itself and run the active shade so that's how the noise is looking right now and lets me decrease the scale because obviously this is very small and we want to have bigger noise map so let's try the scale off probably points to would work maybe points one and two bigs let's try something like point eighteen so that's our first layer of bump for creating that daily unevenness I'm going to stop that also delete this map to material for the time being so these are the European snap so just separate them from the wait Maps here now to actually use this map this knowing that as our bump map we need to actually first of all add an Arnold bump to the node then use this noise map add the bump map and now we can connect the bump map to the normal input of our standard surface trader so let me connect that to the normal input and if I come down here select the bump 2d node itself and run the activeshade okay let's make sure the standard surface shader is the material that's been assigned to our plane and run the active shade so as you can see now clearly the bump map is expecting our surface but as you can see the highlights from our clear coat contribution are not being affected by the bump map that we assigned to our shader and the reason is if I select my standard surface shader here you can see the coating section has its own normal parameter here built so we need to actually connect our bump 2d node both to the normal attribute which is in the geometry section of the standard surface shader and the normal input that is available in the coding section so let's connect the output of the bump to denote as well through the coast normal input here and as you can see immediately those highlights are being adjusted and being affected by the distortion that's caused by our bump to denote okay obviously this parameter is way too high and what we want here is something way subtler as you can see on this surface these waves are this unevenness is very subtle so let's select our bump to denote and change the bump height probably something like 0.1 you can see now these highlights are distorted but point one might be a bit too much some trying something like point zero five probably would be better okay now you can see we get this uneven surface which is manifested in this distorted wavy highlights okay it's very subtle but it's gonna add a lot to the overall look let me just stop the active shape and for that higher frequency details I'm probably going to use the same magazine for our roughness parameters so what I'm going to do again so I want to have another range map so from the Maps Arnold math let's get another range map let's use the same texture VW 38 as our input and the range if I get another map to material here you can open up a preview but I can get this okay so if I can make this map directly to the texture map input of the Maxima Tyrael what's going to happen I don't want to basically have this very dark spot because if this is connected to our bump map input it's going to cut very harsh indents I just want to have very subtle a high-frequency detail so what I'm going to do with the range map is to basically raise this dark quality so they are not that dark so in this case probably I'll change the output name to something like point six and as you can see we have this a bright traveled texture and those dark spots are brighter compared to before and this is what we're going to be using as our bump map in conjunction with our noise map as well and now to mix this two we can use something like a mix Maps so again let's load and mix RGB eight notes from the math section use our this texture that we have right here as our first input the noise as our second input now obviously I want this noise not to be more effective the noisemap is our second input so let's increase the if I just connected mix Alec salute to our texture map here directly right now we are getting 50% of the knowing map and 50% of the range map that we have here and this is the result but I want the noise map with more effective and as it is the second input let's change the Maxwell if something like point 71 if it's one we're just getting a noise map if it's zero we are only getting the texture if it's 0.5 we get 50% update and conversion of that and if I go to something like 4.75 now we are favoring our second input and this maps and this node has been discussed thoroughly in our comprehensive introduction to auto 438 next so make sure to check that out on our website mograph plus that come if you want to have more information about normal for 3ds max and now we can connect the output of our mix to the bump map okay instead of this we can't delete this map to material and now we can try to see how this look in our final trader this is our bump nodes here perfect I'm just going to take a final render quickly and obviously as I mentioned the subsurface scattering can be simply added for example in this case if you wanted to add subsurface scattering simply go to the subscript scattering layer for something like plastic you can simply copy your base color and use it as your subsurface scattering color and in this case probably the subsurface scattering wouldn't be that effective but in the example that we had here if I can find it this picture here you can see the subsurface scattering is very dominant so in this case you need to increase the subsurface scattering which probably something like 0.72 get the look that you are after but in this case because the geometry that we have is very weird and we have this bulky section and these very thin sections here the subsurface scattering is not going to work and we need to adjust them per geometry but for a geometry that has a more evenly distributed shape compared to what we have you can actually add that subsurface scattering and probably something a weight like point 25 would be very nice you need obviously to control the radius based on what you're trying to create but you can generally speaking add subsurface scattering to your plastic shaders with a lower wall you like point 25 and the same color as your base color to actually get that extra level of realism you can try that on your own in this case I'm just going to use a subsurface scattering up to zero and now we can actually start and render our final scene what I'm going to do is to make sure my lights have enough samples so that's like my first light and let's increase the sample for also make sure these two lights have enough samples for and for their good and if I just go to my render setting I'm gonna change the output to production renderer and I'm going to save out a high-resolution render for you guys you can check out on our website but for now let's just render at 1280 by 720 render okay in the settings I'm just going to turn up the preview for now increase the camera samples to about five and diffuse specular samples to about four if we added that subsurface scattering the fact that I was talking about we needed to increase our SSS sample as well okay so that's good now we can actually render the scene and when it's done I'll be back to wrap up this video okay guys so here is our final Runner and you can see we get this beautiful realistic plastic shader using Arnold for 3ds max obviously if you want to have a red plastic instead of a screen plastic you need to go to your standard surface and change the base color to the color that you want and as you can see it is very nice subtle variations in our specular and code values which gives us this final render and now another thing is I want to talk the subtlety so make sure when you are actually connecting those math and texture to your specular weights and roughness and code weight and roughness make sure they're not that contrast see because the subtlety is what makes the shader look that great okay now this was the first video we're going to be uploading a lot of videos like this in which will be developing realistic shaders in Auto for 3ds max for glasses metals and other stuff so make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on facebook twitter and vimeo to be able to follow those videos as well and to be able to follow this video that we'd better I would recommend that you go to our website Morales calm and check out our comprehensive introduction to Auto for 3ds max course about eight hours of video content in which we'd explain and explore arm for 3ds max all of its render settings materialize and everything so make sure to check that out as well thanks for watching see you in the next video thanks for watching this free video tutorial promo graph flash comm if you are interested in learning on all four 3ds max fundamentally please make sure to check out our comprehensive introduction to Arnold for 3ds max course which is a massive eight hour long course in which we explore all the aspects of Arnold for 3ds max thoroughly

Channel: MographPlus

Views: 21,440

Keywords: Arnold, 3ds max, maxtoa, shading, plastic, material, tutorial, rendering

Id: eMilmxJHtwc

Length: 46min 34sec (2794 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 11 2017