Understanding (Almost) All Material Nodes in Blender 2.9 - Beginner Tutorial

hello everybody my name is michael from polygon island and welcome to how to use shader nodes in blender so there will be multiple parts in this video um the time stamps will be on the screen now uh basically we're gonna go over just general bsdfs then we're gonna go over uh texture nodes and then we're gonna go over procedural shading nodes so let's get right into this so there are two ways you can access the shading menu in blender you can go up here to the very top where it says shading under the tabs right here and click that and then it'll bring you to the shading tab or what you could do which is what i do most of the time is go over to the top left right under the blender logo put your cursor right there it'll turn into this little cross thing all you have to do is click and then drag and it will split your window and not only from here can you access the shader menu but you can access any other viewport that you want so the shader editor is the third from the bottom and it has this little ball and it says shader editor you can also hit shift f3 to go into this menu so clicking the shader editor what we're going to do is we have these the principal bsdf the principal bsdf is the default uh shader that comes in your material from blender so uh with the default cube it already has a material applied but if you have another object that you add to your scene let's say a sphere you can see that it doesn't have a material it doesn't have that principle bsdf so to make a material you can either go down here to the right to this little checkerball kind of thing this is a material tab and you can click new and you can see over here it creates that material also what you can do is just click new at the top right here if you don't see it you can use your middle mouse click and then you can move over if that's not in your view for some reason and clicking new does the same exact thing you can see it brings it over here too but um i'm going to use a sphere for this so i'm going to bring this over here and i'm going to scale it up ctrl a and then apply scale [Music] you don't have to do this this is just what i'm doing um and i'm also going to give this to subdivisions and shaded smooth just for viewing purposes so i'm going to be using cycles for this um but you can also use ev ev is pretty much the exact same in material standards except for any kind of transparent or glass material glass materials in ev are very complicated and it's just very finicky for glass and eevee so what we have here if we switch over to cycles is we have our ball so you can see uh with the base material everything's white um its roughness isn't very high you can see over here there's a little bit of reflection off of both these planes and the ball and let's get started with the principal bsdf so the principal bsdf uh here's your base color this base color obviously changes the basic color of the mesh um you have your subsurface radius which you can change from one to point two to point one this basically um helps with subsurface scattering how big you want your subsurface scattering to be and subsurface color if you're using a subsurface scattering node you can change this um for your subsurface scattering if you don't know what subsurface scattering is it's basically um seeing the inside of a material like if you hold your hand up to a very bright light and you can see the red inside your hand that's subsurface scattering it's basically used to make more realistic human faces or stuff like cheese or something um but yeah metallic it changes the metallic properties of the metal uh you can pretty much it's pretty much zero or one there's really no in between zero is no metallic one is metallic so you can see right here it changes um the sphere to a more metallic kind of color and also you can change that with roughness to make it a shinier metal or just a very dull metal so i'm going to leave this at the 0.5 that it was at and turn this back down so specular specular is how much light the material absorbs so for example if i change the color to black right here you can see that it is reflecting light still um it's not solid black it still has light reflecting off it if i change the specular all the way up it's reflecting more light and if i change the specular all the way down it is completely black and it is absorbing all light so i'm going to put this back at 0.5 like it was specular tint is basically just the tint of color uh that the light reflects uh this is black with a white light so it doesn't really do anything right there but i'm gonna change this back to um and change this back to white so uh now we have roughness roughness is how rough the object is how much light it reflects and how much light it diffuses so if you change the roughness all the way up you can see there is very little light reflecting off of it and if we change it all the way down you can see that it is very shiny uh you might not be able to see it here but if i turn it all the way black you might be able to see this um if i also change the plane roughness to all the way down you can see you can see it a lot better it's reflecting the ball and stuff right there so um now that we have that i'm going to change this back to a gray color and we have anisotropic anisotropic uh uranus tropic whatever it is it's basically um if you have you ever seen like pans and they have that weird circular design on the bottom of the bottom of them that's what anisotropic is so we can turn anisotropic on and we can see that it's reflecting this kind of circle on the sphere uh anisotropic rotation controls where at it's reflecting off of on the mesh and that's really useful for like metal pans metal objects that have anisotropic on them and then we have sheen sheen basically is really useful for hair or anything that reflects like hair sheen is when you look at hair and you have that light reflecting off of them um the light reflects off of the hair and it's shiny and that's what sheen is uh sheen all the way down has no sheen issue all the way up has max sheen um you can't really see on this sphere um even if i turn it all the way up but that's what it does shin tint is the color of the tint uh clear coats it basically adds a like reflective layer over it and you can also change the roughness of that too it basically adds another layer above your object that's shinier or rougher uh index of refraction this is only used for transparent and glass objects index refraction is how it reflects or how it's uh like how see-through it is how it refracts light so for example water is 1.33 and glass is 1.45 transmission uh transmission is also glass so if you want a glass shader you can just change the transmission on the principal bsdf up and we can see that we have this glass shader now transmission roughness makes the glass rougher and yeah a mission you can change the emission if you want uh the emission uh this is also basically um an emission shader except instead of just being complete light source you can see we still have the object to lying underneath so if you want an emission object but still want to retain its original material you can use the emission turning it all the way black obviously is no emission and stuff like that alpha is how transparent the object is if you want a transparent object you can just change the alpha to zero i want a half transparent object you can change it to like 0.5 and then no transparency at all is one so now let's get into the other main bsdfs so the easiest way to see all your bsdfs is you could just hit shift a and a shader and you have all these but what you could also do is go over here to the material tab and under surface we have all these bsdfs so principal bsdf basically has a little bit of all these um except for a few so i'm going to go through these as quickly as i can so let's get started and isotropic bsdf it has that anisotropic that we went over earlier um you have the anisotropy value [Music] you have the rotation of it and you have the roughness of it so that's what uh anisotropy is it's basically a really reflective kind of thing um but yeah that's that that's that surface next up we have background uh background is basically just pretty much an emission shader um that's pretty much all i've ever used it for it's just like an emission shader so if we hide this light right here you can see it amidst lights i don't really know what else this is used for to be honest with you but that's what we got so far uh next is diffuse the fuse was basically what principled was before principled was added as default in blender 2.8 so diffuse is your basic color material so pretty much all you can do in this is connect a normal map if you want to color you can change the color of your object and you can change the roughness of it so yeah that's that um the difference about this and the roughness in um principal bsdfs is that this you can't have completely reflective shiny see the roughness is at zero and it's not like that so yeah that's that and next surface we have glass bsdf um i've already run over what glass bsdfs are there they're glass and you have the roughness of the glass if you want like a frosted glass look or if you just want glass index of refraction right here you can change how reflect the material is for example if i change to 1.33 this is the refraction of water and then 1.45 is the refraction of glass there's a whole you can just look up index of refraction for certain objects if you're trying to get a certain object like plastic or something and there's a whole list of the index refraction for different objects next surface glossy bsdf this uh is basically mirror mirror shader if you want to make a mirror you use the glossy bsdf um you can change the roughness all the way up that pretty much takes all the glossy away um all the way down makes it a mirror you can see that it's reflecting everything that's in the scene right now next is hair bsdf hair bsdf you can see it does not work very well on my sphere but this bsdf is used for when you have um hair a lot of times now you use the principled hair bsdf which is right here but you can still use this too next is holdouts uh i have i'm not very sure what this does i i'm gonna be honest with you if anybody does know what this does please leave it in the comments below i'll pin your comments but yeah um it it's just it just turns to black i i don't really know what else it does next is a mix shader uh this shader does not actually apply material to your object it is for mixing two bsdfs together so for example if i put a principal bsdf in here and then i add a translucent bsdf which i'll get to later you can see that it makes it slightly translucent so that's what a mix shader is and now on to the next one so the next one is the principal bsdf we've already went over that and then principal hair bsdf i'm on my plane i did not mean to do that um principal hair bsdf uh you can see that this has a lot more settings than the regular hair bsdf you can change the roughness of the hair the radius of the roughness what kind of coat the hair has if you want to have a coat um what this does is it basically just adds another layer like the clear coat did in the principal bsdf um index of refraction um offsets uh which offsets the reflection of the hair you can see it's moving over there um and then random roughness this basically makes it to where there's random spots on the shader that are more rough than others you can see right here this is more rough um over here um it's more rough and then like through here and stuff it's shiny um that's what the principal hair bsdf is and now principal volume principle volume the way this works is you can't have it plugged into the surface of your material output volume needs to be plugged into this volume and what it does is it's basically just volume it's fog it's missed it's whatever you want to call it um usually this i only use to add volume in my scenes i'll use a cube and scale it up to cover my entire scene and then yeah that's that okay next material next material uh i should probably change this to surface again next is refraction bsdf uh this is just refraction of uh things around you uh the things in the scene you can see it's reflecting light it's not reflecting it's refracting um and then we can also change the roughness and stuff of this too the index of refraction you can change that um and yeah specular is just basically how how it absorbs light you can change the colors and stuff um i'm not really i don't really know what this is used for per se i just know it can be used in mix shaders and note groups and stuff to add different specularities to your materials next is subsurface scattering so instantly when we print on subsurface scattering you can see that we can see the inside of this object so you can change the color to anything you want and then we can change the scale and stuff so you can see we can see inside this object where it's red it's reflecting light from the inside um i wouldn't really use subsurface scattering um as a material node what i would do is just add a subsurface or not that i would use this subsurface scattering with a principal bsdf and mix it together um so that would be that um we can also add blur to it if you want if you're using a texture on the inside for subsurface scattering which we'll get into for a little bit how to connect textures to nodes but yeah that's that uh next we have the tomb bsdf which basically makes uh makes it very cartoony um you can't really see it good here but you can change the size of how cartoony you want your um bsdf to be and you can change the smoothness which isn't really making it very smooth here but that's just because of the subdivisions we have on our sphere next we have the translucent psdf which just makes your object translucent for example if i take the light and then i put it inside the object you can see that the light is coming out of the object um it's basically just a really cheap emission shader if you do this but yeah it makes the object translucent you can kind of see through it but it's not transparent it's just letting light through it and that's what translucency is so transparent bsdf makes the object transparent you can see now we can see completely through the object uh you can also change the color of the transparency if you want um and yeah that's pretty much it for that shader next is velvet um this is good if you're trying to make like a velvet cloth or something like you're trying to make anything that was made out of velvet you can change the sigma of it which is how light reflects off of it and you can also of course connect a normal map to it if you want and next we have volume absorption which is another volume node um this doesn't really do anything unless you pair it with the volume note itself uh basically show it's basically these two other two volume nodes are basically what principal volume is um and then like volume scatter this is an actual volume node so you can see um pretty much it doesn't really do anything because you have to pair those two nodes together so if i just type in volume absorption and then add a mix shader and put these two together we see that if we turn down the density it is now volume so um that's that it basically it's like a more dense kind of volume um and you have more control over it so texture nodes are basically all the nodes that you use to add image textures into your scene and connect them to your principal psdf so obviously you don't have to use a principal bsdf you can use any one but if you just want an image texture itself then use the principal bsdf so if we connect this we can see that it's back to what we had before in the beginning of the video and to add the easiest way to have a full texture setup is by going to edit and then preferences and then add-ons and then just typing node in here and then enable node wrangler uh node wrangler just basically makes nodes like texture nodes and stuff a lot easier you can also control shift click to view them themselves which is really cool but yeah so to add a uh image texture i'm actually going to use this plain um to add an image texture so click on the principal bsdf or whatever shader you're using and hit ctrl shift and t um if you only have one texture and it's not a pbr texture setup it's just ctrl t ctrl t just adds one of these image node setups um but let me go ahead and explain this before i add the texture so the texture coordinates you have generated normal uv object camera window and reflection so pretty much the only ones you're going to be using to map a texture are these three generated normal and uv generated is just where blender thinks the texture should go normal follows the normal map data of um or the normal data of the uh object to map a texture and then uv is a uv map so uh to uv unwrap you would hit tab to go into edit mode and click u and then unwrap i'm gonna go ahead and do this to apply texture and yeah so pretty much what you're gonna wanna do unless you're using like a very very basic mesh or like something in the background or something like that is use uv if you're using a uv sphere it's already pretty much uv mapped you can use generated on that you should be able to at least and then mapping this is basically where the texture like the position the rotation and the size of the texture and then the image texture node is obviously your actual texture so i'm gonna go ahead and get rid of these real quick and because i have a pbr texture set up so i'm gonna hit ctrl shift and t and see down here is this principle texture setup so if i go down to my pictures i have uh this ground um stuff so basically just select all your textures um some of them might be included that don't work in blender or won't be included but that's okay then just click principal texture setup and you see now we have a complete um we have a complete principle texture set up and now let me explain some of these nodes that is added so normal map uh normal maps and bump maps are basically synthetic detail or simulated detail that the thing has so if i turn this so if we look at the um object you can see that it looks like there it's bumpy you can see that right here and stuff the leave looks like it's coming up but in reality it's just a texture data it's not actually changing the mesh or doing anything like that and if we change it to zero we can see that it is now flat again and it is just a texture um so with that um it's also not flat here so if we change this to zero two others displacement it is now just a texture so i'm gonna change this back to one and then i'm going to change the strength of the normal map back to 1 as well so now the displacement node displacement node is what actually changes the mesh this node you basically subdivide your mesh a ton of times to where it has a ton of geometry and then this displacement node will displace that geometry now to make it actually displace the geometry on a physical level you would have to go into your material settings where you have the displacement on and then settings and then displacement change it to displacement and bump so that's that basically and that is our texture completely done um and you can see over here we basically have the texture coordinate and mapping nodes um connected to all these vectors in the textures now when you're if you're adding these manually if you're adding textures manually you'll notice on color space the color says srgb but all the other ones say non-color and the reason for that is the color data over the color map the albedo map whatever you want to call it is the only thing giving color data to the texture everything else is black and white or the colors don't matter and that's very important to set as non-color if the image isn't supposed to give color data set to non-color it can mess up the color data to make the texture look not not look right and just stuff like that so uh what i was talking about earlier with the ctrl shift click um on different notes to view them you can basically see um if i click ctrl shift click on roughness when you see our roughness map right here so the grays blacks and whites dictates where it should be rough and where it should not be rough so also the normal map we can see that you can see here it's the synthetic detail it shows wherever things should be sticking out where everything should be popping out and stuff like that and then displacement map is another black and white texture and basically the blacks are supposed to be like dipped in and the whites are supposed to come up i'm pretty sure that's right it's either blacks are supposed to dip in and whites are supposed to come up or why it's supposed to go down and blacks are supposed to come up but yeah um we can also change our no we see our normal map node which gives us more detail on our normal um but it's basically the same thing we can see uh where all the bump is supposed to be and we can click our displacement node and now we can definitely see where things are supposed to come up at so these like weird colors right here uh obviously those things are really high up um in the displacements and then these little like this yellow red green area is where it's still coming up but it's not coming up like that much and then the blacks are just to where displacement isn't affected so now if i just control shift click on material output again or the principal bsdf when you see that we have the texture back and that is that procedural textures uh this is the final part in this tutorial um and it's procedural nodes so procedural nodes are very very handy um they are basically uh textures that can be put on pretty much any object they're not made from any image textures they're just made from procedural textures inside blender so if we go ahead and give this a new material or yeah our sphere has a new material now what we can do is we can shift a and then type in texture and now we have all these textures right here so i'm not going to go through all of these because they're pretty much the same but i'm going to go through a few um that are used a lot so the first is the noise texture the noise texture basically pretty much does what it says so it adds noise to um the object so uh you can see right here all the different colors and stuff are the noise and yeah um one thing i like doing with noise textures um a lot is making a very simple ground material and the way you would do that is just disconnect the noise texture add a bump map and then put the color into the heights of the noise texture in the normal instant normal of this so um you can see that it adds a bump with the noise texture you can also change the scale of the noise texture the roughness of the noise texture the distortion of it and just stuff like that you can also change the detail if you want to have a lot of detail but yeah um this is kind of like already like a drywall kind of material but um that's not what we're going over right now but you can definitely see where the noise texture is being applied on the object next texture is going to be a must grave texture so the muskrat texture uh you can put the height into the color and basically it does this um it adds like just wibbly wobbly effects to um the the uh sphere the sphere it's called sphere it adds like these like wibbly wobbly effects to the sphere you can change the scale detail dimension looking already of this too um yeah just different stuff like this you can change it all and different stuff like that so um what we can also do is we can also chain these textures together so you can shift a and then add a noise texture and then you can put the color into the vector of the muskrate texture and you can see now that our noise texture is applying onto our must grave texture so if we disconnect it you can see it's like this and then we add that noise to it and it adds this and next texture we're going to use i'm going to go ahead and disconnect these um just move them over here next thing we're going to add is our voranoid texture for veroni voronoi i whatever it's called and just just uh the color into the base color the principal bsdf and we can see now we have these like uh cells uh this cell kind of thing on our mesh um you can change it to 1d uh 2d or 2d 3d and 40. basically how many dimensions it has you can also change f1 f2 just for different styles smooth f1 this is basically um what the default is except it's smooth um like it blurs the lines between them uh distance to edge i don't really know what that does and then n sphere radius i don't really know what that does so i'm going to keep it on f1 and we can change from euclidean to manhattan and that changes it a little bit instead of making them just sharp corners and lines it kind of like gives them different shapes and we can also change it to chevy chev which kind of overlays more on top of them um and then minkowski which is like a complete mess but yeah that's basically what that does you can also change the scale randomness and w don't really know what w is um and stuff like that and once again you can also chain these together so you can see now we kind of have this really really trippy kind of thing going on right here and also if you really wanted to if you wanted to make that something cool you could add an emission shader put the color into the emission shader and then put this into the surface and so you can see now that we have this really trippy kind of um procedural background kind of kind of thing so it's pretty cool right there um but yeah um you can do a lot with these procedural nodes and yeah but you also have other ones like brick textures um you can just put the color into the color of that you can see it adds bricks to it and you can also change the scale mortar size bias brick width row height stuff like that this kind of looks more like a wood than it does a brick but you get the point so there's tons of stuff you can do with this um you can also pair them with color ramps um let's say you want a color ramp right uh you put the color into the fact of the color ramp and then the color into the color of the emission and it basically you can up the blacks up the whites and also if you want to you can mix this with a diffuse and then you can add a mix shader put this right here put the diffuse in the bottom and then put the color into the fact of the big shader and so you can see it's mixing um you can also put the color of this into the ambition shader too but you can see now it is mixing that kind of diffuse with um the image so you can see we can turn this down and it's mixing the white parts in with this if we turn it all the way up we can see that it is now pretty much just the material so uh that's pretty much um shader nodes um pretty much the beginner's shader node tutorial so if you guys liked it make sure to leave a comment subscribe that would really help me out but thanks guys so much for watching my name is michael from polygon island and i'll see you guys next time bye

Channel: Stargaze Imagery

Views: 4,122

Rating: 4.8823528 out of 5

Keywords: blender, blender shader, blender shading, blender nodes, node editor, node tutorial, procedural shader, procedural material, procedural, texturing tutorial, texture in blender, blender texture, blender material, material nodes, shading nodes, pbr, pbr tutorial, pbr texturing tutorial, blender tutorial, easy, beginner, fast

Id: fppSeX3SVu8

Length: 29min 8sec (1748 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 17 2020