Using fabric textures in Blender (Couch Part 5)

the hard work is done our couch is uh looking like a couch at least from the viewpoint viewport perspective um in this video we're going to take a step in the direction of rendering with materials so material is actually pretty important for a couch um designers put a lot of effort into choosing the right threads and the the visual movement and the colors and if you've ever been to a furniture shop and they hand you a swath of like a hundred different types it's actually pretty integral to the design um of the couch now from our reference we don't have a lot of information it's uh unfortunately i searched far and wide with bing and uh did not find any high-resolution uh images evidently the manufacturer wants you to email them to get high-res photos but you have to have like a press use i don't know if i class as press and i didn't want them to shut the whole tutorial down so anyways we just have this and um we can see it's relatively plain but something that's quite important to this is it has slobs so slubs are essentially almost like the the threads have been pulled it's almost like they're wider in various places so some columns some rows are slightly wider than others which makes them kind of bolder um and they do it in kind of a varying pattern so that it gives it visual movement um and that's important because if it wasn't like that it would look just like a blank canvas very plain very boring um so the texture that you use is very important now you can get your textures from anywhere however i would highly recommend that you at least make sure that they are not photographed so we learned this the very hard way um when we tried making fabric textures for polygon we got like a whole photo scanning setup we got samples sent in and we started photographing them and then we realized two problems one the threads are always blurry because they're so small and two the thread rows are so small that there is it's almost impossible to line up one straight line from one edge to the other which means that you can never actually make the texture fully seamless because even if you blow the edges or whatever you're always going to have this kind of stepping issue with with the threads going across it and that's a problem on a couch because you have to scale the fabric more than usual it because it is so big so what we did at polygon and this is of course going to sound like an advert for polygon because it is in a way an advert for polygon that look at the shirt right you clued in yet why do you think i made this tutorial series no i i am really i've been wanting to make a couch tutorial for a long time but it just so happens it's also quite quite uh appropriate for polygon but anyways so we created a library of basically designer selected fabric for upholstery for furniture and they're photorealistic they're procedural and most importantly they are fully tileable from one direction to the other so if you go to polygon go to the fabric section there is a whole bunch to choose from we also just updated it with a bunch of leather if you're making a leather couch by all means go ahead um the one that we are going to be using is this one moss plain weave which you might think like huh bold choice moss we're really going to go for a mossy swamp color couch uh yes and no so with each one of these uh each each texture we give you three variations of the color so you can see we get that color and then we also get this color unfortunately you can't click it without deselecting but anyways this is the one that we're actually going to use here which looks pretty similar to this guy right here with uh kind of the brownie kind of thing but we'll make uh some adjustments there so anyways uh you only need the 2k version um this is a premium texture uh you have to be a member of polygon to download it however if you're not a member and you'd like to try it out i've got a low res version um in the description for you to download so we're going to download this just hit download on all the maps whilst you're doing that i'd also let you know that if you're ever in the need for something specific you need a texture for a specific couch that you can't find anywhere online we have an upholstery fabric generator so basically this is a file that lets you select the exact specifications for the texture so in this case the weave type you can change and customize your own weave type you can change the thickness of the horizontal vertical strands you can add patterns aging and of course you can choose the colors so you just export them as pags and load them into blender like you would for any other texture this might sound a little bit advanced for you right now but if you ever find yourself working for a client in the future who has very specific texture demands this will almost certainly solve it for you so assuming you've downloaded the zip file just unzip it to a folder and we're actually going to use the polygon material converter add-on which is free i'll put a link to that in the description as well you just go edit preferences and then hit install check that little enable box and you should be good to go by the way you don't have to use this add-on if you want to load any to the map separately but this would just save you time then when you go to your material settings down here you'll see a whole bunch of oh no sorry you won't see that you just have to paste in the the place that you have saved uh sorry unzipped the zip file and then if you've got a bunch of other textures in there then you'll see them all appearing here so this is the one that we're going to use this one that's called moss so with my object here selected i'm just going to hit load and apply now if you go to material preview right here we can see that it has already been loaded in how convenient is that and if you were to split the view and then shift f3 will take you to the shader settings shader editor right here and you can see it this is what the material converter has done it's set it up with like a quick scaling value here that you can sort of play with this has got some handy controls if you want to adjust any of the settings like for example the roughness of it it's a little bit too shiny out of the gate i like to just increase it to about a point two um it's already plugged in the the bump map displacement map we won't actually use the displacement map so i'll disable that and it's also included a fabric falloff option because it's detected that it's fabric now this was actually added because the fabric has to be compatible with other rendering engines all this does is it creates sheen but you'll notice that the principal shader actually has a sheen slider here so we don't actually need this so if you just hit it uh select it and hit control x that'll delete it but it'll keep the connections that it's already got i just need to reconnect this roughness one because evidently it hasn't guessed that that was the right place um but there once it finishes reloading in everything we can see that this is what we have now the sheen value what is sheen sheen is um the best way to describe it it's sheen it's like the little fuzz that you get across like if we make this completely black just to highlight it and show it it's basically like it's adding like a fresnel effect if you're familiar with what fresnel is but it's yeah it's like the fuzz effect oh it's also got alpha so you can actually see through it so we don't want that either if you were using it for like a flag like a waving flag in the breeze you would want to have the alpha value there but obviously in our case we don't anyways this is completely black now so if we set the sheen all the way to zero you can see that we get that turn it all the way up to one and you get that so yeah it's like fuzz like fabric little fuzz like a little razor bit that's basically what the sheen value uh is for so i'll plug in my base color again and here is actually where we can tweak um the color that we actually want for our cage couch i've recorded this a few times now that quite often disturbingly often i've said couch instead of couch anyway um so if you go into this this node group here which has everything added in for us just hit tab and that'll take you in here it does look complex don't worry about it it's it's all automated it's basically plugged in the alpha the glass etc etc um the color is the one that we actually want to change because we wanted to change it to a different map that we downloaded so we're just going to go with this one variation three if you know what you're doing by the way you can use an id map to pull different channels and then you could actually change each channel to be a different color that's kind of more advanced but it's there if you uh if you wanted it anyway we're going to load in that one variation 3 and it looks like this and doesn't that look lovely um did i did i mention i was changing the scale okay so the scale is uh it's also quite important to the realism of the couch so a really common one i see is a lot of people use the wrong scale i see a lot of couches that look like that and actually whilst we're at it we might as well just select all of these other objects one by one finally select that one as the last one ctrl l and then just click materials and that will copy the set material to every object and we can see this is how it looks so this is okay the problem is is that yeah the scale is way off like if you were to run your hands on this would almost be like a wicker like straw couch almost it would just be it'd be nutty so it's almost like double what you expect it to be and then double again in in terms of like the size of it um it's usually always uh the thread count is a lot smaller than you would actually imagine if you're getting like tiling issues which you shouldn't have with our textures but if you were you know you might want to dial it back a little bit if it was unavoidable but in our case uh it looks okay so i'm just gonna go three uh like so and that is basically it that's really all there is to it for the texturing shading phase um it's turning up the sheen machine sheen and uh setting the scale to be accurate and uh you know the normal maps being used uh the displacement's not being used because it's just basically the same as the normal map in this case one other thing you might want to do is change the direction of the fabric so you can see that this looks a little bit odd having this um front bit be a different direction visually than this other stuff so that's something that a designer would not stand for like if they were designing the couch so i think it makes sense that we should flip it so the way i do this is go to the uv image editor tab and then uh just mouse over that front bit there and then hit l so not clicking or anything just hitting l and mine's done because i've already done it but underneath select linked if you want to be able to just select that patch uh just check seam right and then it'll enable you to when the part that you select it'll only select what's inside of that island of the seam and i only learned this like within the year basically that value i was like wow that's cool how did i not know that anyways now that i've done that i can just hit a r and then type in 90 and that will have rotated it by 90 degrees and now you can see that they are pulling in the same direction yeah just like 9 11 everyone's pulling together i don't know i wasn't there that's what i've heard people say everyone was pulling together um who would have thought that at part five in a couch tutorial we'd be talking about 9 11. but you never know where you go that's why i'm scared of like restarting my podcast who knows what sort of weedy topics i would end up in okay this one has not been properly uv unwrapped so that's annoying i'll just select everything hit u and then unwrap now these won't be perfectly straight but that's okay because fabric's also not perfectly straight um but yeah it that's that's totally fine it's it's not a big deal um one final thing we will do to end out this video is uh it it looks nice let me go to the this view yeah it looks nice um however there is something that it's missing that could elevate this to something that looks a little more real and that is that fabric is never perfectly flat and ironed even in the best hotel um there will always be tiny little creases where you know it's been sitting in that position for 10 odd years or not even that long and it's developed a hard crease which even when you pull the fabric taut um you can still see and that is something i've realized does actually add a significant amount to to the overall look so we're going to use this texture here um which is one on polygon and it's not included in the low-res you know thing below it but um i'm sure there are some free equivalents out there if you wanted to get it otherwise you could sign up for polygon and support the channel as well as uh have everything you need to make nice furniture and beyond anyways i'll show you how we're going to use it essentially um it's just add in a single image texture thank you yes yep toggle great um add in a single image texture locate where it is that you've uh saved it to and i've downloaded a bunch of them um which one is it it's something creases wrinkles there we go um now turns out really the only one you need is not the normal map it's the black and white map right here because that's really easy to combine with other bot maps normal maps are tricky they're finicky to figure out so we're just going to use this black and white displacement map hit open make sure you set this to non-color data which you should do anytime you're using a map not in the base color input and then we just we just want to combine this with the normal input there right because that's that's where the bumps come in so the way you do that is very simple once my viewport is no longer hijacked wow that that took a a long time to refresh that's frustrating so we're going to go vector bump and we're going to connect this into the height input the height input right there and then we'll take the normal put that into the normal input and then this to go into the normal input there as well now this strength value here is going to obviously determine uh how strong it should be and by default it should be way too strong i'm almost certain of it let's wait hey that's not an improvement that is a regression okay so you put it at point one and you can see um the sort of effect you get now um obviously you can change the scale of it to have different or varying effects um how does that look that's not too bad um you know if you went by the same one from here it would actually line up perfectly with the texture which isn't actually a good thing because it might look noticeably tiled and that this always matches this part of the fabric if you know what i mean um so anyways i think i will just use a uh scale of two yeah that's yeah um how does that look is that the scale of that yeah yeah i'm just going to instead just use the normal mapping like this uv to the vector let's try it again and i'm going to set the scale here to 2. what i did just there by the way click and drag down and you can enter in all of the values at the same time pro tip pretty handy all right and obviously we want to turn down the strength once we bring it up but i reckon scalar 2 will definitely work well for this there we go and then let's just drag this down so you can see like this is with it turned off and then this is like bringing it in slightly right you can definitely see it more in the corners there um it does it it adds something it's like it's like you wouldn't even be able to like if you put it on subtle enough right which you should do don't go overboard with something like this but if you put it on just subtly enough your eye won't be able to notice it necessarily but it it it tricks your eye into thinking that what you're looking at looks real right it's like it's it's an extra layer of detail that it doesn't expect to see from a cg render and it yeah it essentially it's just these tiny little bits of like ruffle right tiny little bits um which you know the the base model is the one that's shining it's the one that's telling all the detail in the story but this little bit there it's it's almost like a trick like a brain trick um but yeah i just find it adds a lot to the uh to the overall render uh so there we go so that's it for this video now the next part is also very important and that is going to be adding in physical seams which is very exciting because uh um i i discovered a method that's that's uh really easy to do so we're gonna do that so go ahead click here on that video and i will see you there

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 348,907

Keywords: blender, tutorial, couch, blender couch tutorial

Id: zyrm9GH51Y4

Length: 16min 56sec (1016 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 07 2020