Unleashing Driver Functions & Shader Nodes

welcome everyone thank you for attending um please make yourself comfortable as we start this session today uh we will delve into two integral aspects of blender's Arsenal so driver functions and Shader nodes this talk goes over um all aspects of my visual workflow and U and its main Pur purpose is to be an overview of the key features I have been using for a long time now uh with that said some of the those topics are intermediate to advanced level and already asum as you know you're around the user interface alongside some Vector map fun operations uh that goes for both folks watching online and the live audience here and uh I I think most of you will be eager to nerd out about some of the process sh so we can do a formal Q&A by the end of the session and continue later a little bit of context about myself uh my name is Louis Kini I'm an artist which has been focusing on realtime rendering and Consulting for a uh great part of my career having spent uh four uh enriching years as part of the sketch fating at epic games uh one of my Mo most fulfilling achievements there was co-running the blender Council which was a short-term initiative to spre spread blender awareness and adoption within the company so w with over uh 12 years of experience in the r of 3D content creation uh I had the privilege of wincing uh blender's remarkable Evolution right into a Swiss knife of creative potential um for sure there are areas that are still very unpolished and requires further development uh for real time especially such as baking and authoring textures but uh it's with those limitations in mind that I come in harmony with the airs that it truly shines uh being the offline rendering workflows uh here's an example of the some of the same game ready mesh being converted for product proposals and 3D printed Collectibles as much of those renders May trick the eyes they they're actually simulating scale and light conditions to really sell the imperfections of an Ecto de desk toy everything you see here is mostly Eevee and cyclos nowadays uh I use blender all around from the initial blocking stage to the final piece and I love that you know the thing about the porting in establishing workflows is uh you're always kind of unintentionally dealing with the biases and quickness of various adoption decisions uh behind it and sometimes these Visions are not align in tendon uh even if the original intention is genuine right that should be enough to impactor for most artistic oriented people uh especially if you're just entering the market um the job should always have the easiness of use as the main goal right so I I try to stay as close to my craft in and out the the digital realm as possible uh building gumpla and other model kits is as my main hobby nowadays I would even dare to say that this is most a side profession by now and I recommend every artist to embrace side activities that enrich their understanding of the world and uh the subject which they specialize upon uh if you're environment artist you know go travel take reference photos visit your local car shop ask the mechanics you know understand how the engines and models work behind the scenes uh experiences like that really elevates your art to the next level um you know and talking more about our Hobbies airbrushing is a widely used to that I used to customized gumla model kits you learn about the different aspects of uh chemical properties of animl and acrylic paints air atomization feing you are to have a very smooth coverage of the plastic surfaces uh there's also the work of polishing sanding masking so the possibilities are endless and this contributed a lot to the way I Tred to represent my Concepts in the digital form um all this led me to create this a ever expanding Personal Collection of services and I know most of you also have been dabbling with the asset browser for for a long time um and well that improved my output exponentially uh regardless you know um I could can waste less time thinking about the user interface hassles and really focus on ideation on top of that every new seed which is generated can be saved for later reusability right so here you can see that all those materials are interchangeable being able to generate like a you know very big amount of variations in the initial structure um and this allow for a high degree of flexibility yeah being that you know uh the good thing is that it it doesn't lose resolution so it remains sharp and preserve the details and this Factor really helps if you want to bake them down into a texture and Export later um so let's dive into my way of working uh beforehand it's important to disclose all content in this presentation was made in version 3.6 before the Ajax F transform was introduced on 4.0 and uh 4.1 and the principal bsdf node I also got more compact as many of you may know and our inputs and options are still there however just organize differently well let's talk about about lighting so lighting is almost everything your work it defines the mood right so to create a full material Library it's very important uh that you work in a Hu saturation agnostic environment for L Dev purposes uh this essentially kind of like reduces any discrepancies across bounce Reflections and ensure like a consistency among all colors so my red Blues yellows are indeed pure and not being skewed by Ambience lighting simple like like box black and white hdrs can be a good starting point for Sol Foundation that end and another things needs to be addressed especially for the procedural parametric designs you saw beforehand uh that when I was looking at some references and I wanted to replicate some of of uh those um uh ideations it kind of became evident that I needed to be for me to achieve the same effects with the with base polygon node primitive uh although that's cheaper and less expensive to load uh I needed that those roundness uh properties and uh well you can only do that with sign distance Fields right so I was looking around and I I'm a big fan of you know Celestial maze as well uh bner has good notes by default but they're not moderate enough when committing to more complex setups like that in comparison like you waste a lot of time creating things from scratch and uh I recommend everyone going over the basics of vector math and functions before dipping your TOS with sign this in fields uh both celes and aring have great lessons on that celes m 2 Kit is free you can find it on the GitHub uh link both and it contains more like 160 utility notes with B basic Primitives so moreover I wish they're included by default you can save all those in your library for quick access it also includes like some 3D ones but I mostly Focus the 2D Fields as they're mostly cheaper um and that's essentially how the geometric pattern is done you know examples are the SD box the SD Enon with varable sides and the EO lateral triangle uh here's showcase how you can use the building s viewer node to preview the fields by creating a compare math note you can pick each one of the Bands you want as far alter you go from the center the rounder the outline will be and you can also use the absolum value to control like its thickness so pay attention how there's a inverse proportional relation between the scale factor and its band size which you may need to compensate later on uh if you tile all that with a module Vector note you're set up for Success you know and you can achieve a basic procedural pattern like that uh other material setups from my collection there are suppli more simple uh that most people would expect in this case uh the wave and the noise texture notes are doing 50% of the heavy lifting you can tweak tweak the mapping uh in grin scales to simulate tribal pants for you know all types of services you want for more advanced users here this tip may not come as a surprise but it's such an overlooked aspect I think it's worth reiterating very commonly you can spot artworks in the wild and you see the colors are not as good as they could be represented this of course should depend highly on the type of mood you're trying Tovey but because RGB linear is the default option for color ramps outto it may work for more analogous combinations you're not getting gradients in its full potential for like complimentary and triadic uses so for op for hsl hug saturation line is you can have help achieve more Vivid Blends on your gradients and the reason for that is quite obvious like um you're you're doing the shorter path to reach the the your outcome in the color wheel so therefore if your if your range is too far away you would end with GRS and the SAT values in between whereas with hsl you're getting the full strength of your values by going the long distance this technique is particularly useful for car paint and materials with frale variation especially on Candy looks and complimentary color combinations you can see here and other like one of the most questions I get from co-workers and other folks ask me is uh how to achieve the the frosted glass transition looks you can see some of this works uh where you really want a subtle variation from Ultra clear to light flat code of paint um well that's a fairly simple setup as well athority has some like caveats here and there to have it like physically accurate you you got to remember to connect your vales not only to the roughness property which is affecting mostly like n glass surfaces but also the to the respective transmission values which most people forget this is why sometimes your glass Shader appears broken or doesn't mimic the same desired effect uh the purest is your gradient the harsher harsher the fallof will appear so another fating is having your bright values always depend being pending to the middle of the spectrum uh yeah you can also pay attention how we using the ease RGB transition type on on the color ramp uh to drive the clear cold roughness input here this is important to get a very sparse black and white gradient that can exacerbate the this type of transition another situation of proper value awareness is when you're using the B shter to fake merge topology on areas of like dense intersection such as the case above in this material we we have a combination of stacked Shader techniques that rely on M po normal inputs and you got to make sure to like plug the bevel Shader data not only to the clear code normal pass which acts as an overlay on top of the most common PBR stack but also the lay layer weight node which is driving the F fact uh this tree may appear simple right now but sometimes your layer weight can be inside node groups and you may always want to remember to expose those values properly so with a good base of the library out of the way how do we proceed into exposing the values and making only the key parameters available in the main properties panel most people understand drivers mainly being useful within animation workflows uh but that couldn't be far from the truth uh if you think about it drivers allow you to have access to almost 90% of the values anywhere for an easier approach uh I'll be using the Urban Camouflage material as an example which can be replicated fairly quickly with only two multiplied vono textures here we'll be identifying its main artistic values that we aim to expose so totally up to five the scale for each respective noise and our colors which totals for three float arrays first we need to create five blank uh values in the custom properties spanel at the bottom of the material tab you can do it like me and drag and drop that menu to the top of the list then create a new property uh you can twe the maximum unit of the float uh like the example here I set it to 100 once you're done uh left click on it like copy as new driver and left click on the input within the material editor you want to be mapped into so select the option base driver and you should be right to go uh but then we ask l how do we do it for colors well colors actually fall under a float Ray type property and the process isn't that much different uh you just need to switch the type drop down and set it subtype to linear color simple as that and then you have um you can twe the RGB here's the result uh for all five properties successfully driving the values in the source Shader material I can can control the scale and and even switch their their colors for the camouflage moving on it's always great to have your search. blinks uh files mimicking its intended purpose in this case this is the rout for all my entire Library so I like keeping the outliner view set to list all data types with that it's easier to Market in as assets and uh as well as like having a l camera setup to quickly render your thumbnails on the Fly uh when I finish altering each material and each driver for each s scene in contrast uh the outo jate thumbnails work well but most of the time you really really want to make your content easily readable and shown in its best intended use case uh the light setup that I created add like a bottom green light to accentuate its present across the plain gray background from the browser it's a not sub subtle change but it it helps a lot so to add a custom thumbnail select the asset remember you need to be on the source. plane in which it's located click on the gear icon on the right and then on the folder icon where it says preview there's a catch for using a custom thumbnails whoever uh depending on the final image size they can add up to the memory and loading times in which they appear on the startup so for that I opted to compress their file size further uh using this open plugin called super PNG uh it still bits Photoshop safe for web compression method miles away uh this one's R this from 112 to 15 we felt like apparent visible artifacts so they load quickly and you know it also impact your your blender startup times anyway um so decals decals defer from shaders they are basically a material applied to a transparent plane alongside a shrink wrap modifier so they are saved as an object type acid in the library it's due to that uh we're going to be exposing the drivers to the object panel instead instead of the material properties for easy accessibility the advantage of like SDF based decals is that differently from image decals you can have more more with less so each design can be modified according to your needs see how simple the crossair decal can be replicated with uh op polar node and the SD box nodes you when using the op po node you can avoid uh weird interpolations on stepped stepped like decals by making sure to use a integer as a property type for for the count number so that way in between values will be skipped um and for I did this for art Direction purposes maybe you want this uh and I also limited the Crosshair Stripes to too uh many of you also may be familiar with the decal machine add-on right uh you can replicate uh some of its techniques with SDF too uh to do that you can like uh disable the ray visibility for glossy surfaces and also their Shadows this helps like to consolidate their appearance when high resolution renders are taken and uh especially under like bright lighting conditions this is a thing above all um you always want to use UV mapping for this technique uh as the generated object space one doesn't translate well when using a shrink WP modifier the auto drained coordinate mapping doesn't account for the offset of the shrink wrap so by using UVS you're always enforcing that it will map perfectly into the surface UVS are also beneficial for situations where you want to duplicate the surface underneath and map into the decal with accurate Precision just pay attention the center will be offsetted always being the 0.0 origin coordinate here you can see the end result for all parameters exposed uh the target the cow is made in the same way as the Crosshair but masking a circle within the Box SDF and inverting the alpha to obtain that result not mentioning you can Leverage The SDF nodes to create procedural bump map decals this technique is not only like constricted to generic Alphas which can be very useful for composing 30 30 and levels of detail where the insets won have a significant impact on the silhouette of the model here is an example of its use on evangelon artwork revamp based from an artist named Mio I found it to be like a great uh subject of study to test this method as the nature of the design has lots of curved surfaces so adapting Tod concept into 3D uh is also a form of visual translation right the fundamental goal is to effectively effectively convey an idea from one medium to another while retaining its Essence and meaning uh it involves considerations of death proportions spatial relationships and language on the other hand you know syntax grammar and cultural context so that's why blocking out your layout is essential you cannot move onwards without doing so beforehand a successful translation for all those factors put together is what designers refer as a a unifies the final piece and just like the principles of gastal you can only attain it when all other aspects are working in harmony just like the PO saying like the hole is greater than the Su of its parts for sure now uh finally arrived to Geometry notes the part where I believe most people were waiting for and uh one of the inhouse tools I adapted to my personal workflow is is is known as the inset maker uh I created this group to automate something I did fairly often which is like uh creating variable cuts and ents I use this to create the details in the car rubber tires as well uh pay attention how the inset scale is variable when I shift the object orang in points breaking it down um first we are using the instance on points notes to map the S object into every vertex this is controlled by a Vertex Group which is being exposed as a selection type the Align erer to Vector node is very important on this stage as well without it our source orientations won't be aligned correctly to every vertex normal and and then we proceeding to booing then out with with a mesh BL Noe this last step can be very costly on performance depending on the source complexity of the uh of your um and the poly count of the the Boolean right uh in addition since I wanted to replicate a parametric effect I decided to add a RGB curve note to drive the vector scale output of each pum mesh uh that allows me to have more control on the fall off of the air scale relative to the Source oring Point and the result is very cool uh to play around as you can see this slides show casing how the selection is being exposed as a Vertex group I can handpick which vertices I want to be the booing to happen uh allowing for a higher like degree of customization also um make sure to check your Source buling orientation Rel is relative to the world sometimes you may want to apply their scale before proceeding to use as a cutter so nevertheless when you have curved s Source objects or more complex surfaces normal artifacts will be sure to happen and you need to be prepared to solve those with a data transfer modifier uh hereby using an order selection of vertex groups we can specify which areas we want the normals of the the the MH to be migrated over and uh you can successfully overwrite their artifacts some of the kit Pat parts that I use um uh are also composed by intricate combinations of modifiers and shape Keys just like drivers shape keys can also be leveraged outside of Animation use cases and uh it's NBA strong foundation too for like concepting and detail stacking right right next uh we have uh a hands Zone example of all those techniques being combined to assist in modeling and concept concepting I can control the bevel variation of the tire its thickness thread depth and many other like visual qualities that otherwise would be counterintuitive to to model and change every time the client wants you can uh see how powerful this is and it's all with BL already um please ignore the fact that the they display as purple you know uh those are from circular dependencies as being old file here's how everything set up we are selecting key values of the bavel modifier uh combined with a simple transform geometry noes to to to to its radius it also has an array modifier to instance and band The Source smash around uh uh hopefully we can have a bavel modifier as a node in the future that way I can convert this entire structure into a geometry nodes uh that's the goal for most of the procedural perimet shown here another similar example of a procedural Hub Cap kit bash part this one can achieve equal types of from variations you know uh you can control the size the distance and the circular visual elements for bolts and other insets uh you can see how I'm using like a simple mesh Boolean node again to control how a cylinder primitive is offsetted into its main shape then I proceed into doing the same combination of array and simp simple deform modifier to expose and repeat the Parn along although we can already Port those into GN it's essential that the bevel modifier becomes a node so we can better make use of its tolerance and angle settings to sign it up uh here are some takeways um I think it's really important to acknowledge that understanding appeal is one of the most you know seeking after qualities on on 3D ARS now day and the current job market mixed with um other other uh factors unfortunately have been over looking this aspect so in a real production environment the concept artist is also responsible for providing its original references which helps in guiding the translation process uh this definition provides like the necessary contexts that 3D artist then can improve and refine their the design taking the experience to the next level right and you know learning curves can be intimida as a beginner and everyone who's been through it for a long time can relate uh in fact some of my my 2019 talk was mostly addressing that topic here are some other concept art um adaptations from Rock H gr concept artists side views up views and I would like to first thank everyone working at both blender Institute uh blender Studio staff uh and the opportunity to present this year it's always really great to be here connect face to face with everyone and also big shout out to all those veterans and masters of equal tenor than myself if not even more some are retired other others continue developing addons and sharing their discoveries every day so big standing over for [Applause] then uh last but not least a friendly reminder to donate to Development Fund if you haven't done so and Q&A yeah yes yes yes you can find on Celestial ma uh tool kit uh on on his GitHub and it's free everyone can download it and start using it these glitches when using BL could you show like you you sol that with recasting normals is there like a trick or so I did not see that long enough I never done that for the data transfer modifier yeah yeah so that's most of the case um nowadays I was trying to replicate that setup with geometry nodes you can already do that but there are some quirks uh you have to pass through the material pass now to do that because of the attributes uh the thing about I still use the data transfer modifier is because you can preview it on uh object uh solid object modes instead of like the EV and Cycles uh so it makes more uh it's it's more easier that way but it's always a case by case situation man like uh sometimes you want to use the vertex groups to isolate and you know see like which parts you want to you want to transfer the the normals sometimes you also want to offset do a like little shrink of the mesh to map correctly that yeah yeah yeah so on on that uh there there is a drop down um to select the vertex group so you need to leverage the vertex group to yeah yeah yeah it's it's most like you you would have to show me show me later the yeah yeah yeah and then we can figure it out together yeah so sometimes you have um um on the car paint especially it's it's accounting for the bounce Reflections for that it's more of a artistic choice you can choose to keep it but I think the Shadows are the most important one yeah question as well you show in one of the last examples that you Dido yes this is a great this is great question and I know it so yes you can see the the bevel is it's changing slightly there and it it won't be perfect until we can have it as a note per se uh uh this this one yes it's a real bevel it's a real bevel you can see it have even has some normal artifacts still there uh if you pay attention to it but from a like thary level of if you're if you're seen the prop from from afar you know uh it for concepting it it works well but again if if you're if you're doing production work then you know you're going to retopo after that and you're going to make sure to fix those but uh it's a bavel modifier it's it's driving a bavel modifier uh on the stack here this is the Stack's the uh the way to normal well it's uh it's doing the way to normals right right so uh um you can also do that uh on the on the Node group itself you can migrate that um in fact because the thing is um sometimes you want to constrain the artifact and you want you want to add edge Loops procedurally to shrink that uh gradient split as he was mentioning we can't do that prely yet so the way normal helps into kind of stay here stay here yeah that for the normal averaging so yeah um thanks everyone and uh I'll be open for questions and catch me on the the roof later as [Applause] well

Channel: Blender

Views: 8,279

Keywords: conference, BCON, BCON23, Blender Conference, Amsterdam, Felix Meritis, b3d, Blender 3D, Conferencia, bconf, blender conf, blendercon

Id: phNVNF0o3gQ

Length: 34min 23sec (2063 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 28 2023