Original subtitles

Modeling Details and Refining the Scene

In this lesson, we will be modeling and refining

many details in our scene, specifically looking at our textures

and how to develop an excellent texturing workflow.

We'll make some complex things, but don't worry, it will be simple

once you break it down to its basic building blocks.

Let's get going.

As we have some initial lighting and a lot of our macro details in place,

let's get into the nitty-gritty of refining the details of our scene

and adding in some textures to bring everything to life.

To start, I'll refine the details on the columns we made.

I made these as linked duplicates

so any changes I make to one, it'll apply to all of them.

Work smarter, not harder with these things.

I will do Ctrl + R to add a Loop Cut, scroll up once to make it two,

hit click down to select it, and then, we'll commit that.

Now with those selected, I can hit S and Z to scale them along the Z-axis.

Now, I can select with Face Select mode

the top section here and the bottom section here.

Let's hit Alt + E to Extrude Faces Along Normals.

I can pull these out

to make them look a bit more like support beam columns there.

Let's once again add two Loop Cuts in here

and scale these along the Z-axis so that they're just below these.

I'll have these go inward,

so in Face Select mode, select the top and bottom faces we just created.

Hit Alt + E and then, we'll push them in slightly.

One more time, I'll scroll up along the Z-axis.

Then let's bring these ones out a slight bit too,

so we have a bit of variation.

This adds some extra detail to this.

Let me select the bottom ones.

If it's doing that, make sure you're selecting the vertical face there

and do the same thing for the top one.

Hit Alt + E.

Then we'll pull all these out a bit here too. Now, I will do a bit of beveling to add a bit of a taper here.

To do that, I will select this top one.

I will be in Edge Select mode, Alt + Shift + click on this face here,

hit Ctrl + B, pull down a bit, and scroll up

so we've got a bit of a curve down there as well, which looks nice.

Now, I'll select the faces of ribbing around our columns like this

and do a Select and a Checker Deselect.

This will deselect every other face.

Now, we've got this alternating thing.

I can burn these in by doing Alt + E, Extrude Faces Along Normals,

and hold them in slightly.

Sometimes columns can have these bits of detail.

That looks a bit too blocky, so let's bevel it a bit.

Give it a slight bevel there and Tab out back into Object mode.

That's looking nice.

We've got some nice column details here, so let's add some texture to this.

For our texturing,

I'll be using a mix of a lot of the free textures and materials here from BlenderKit.

You can use their nifty search engine here,

search by category, or search by free-only.

There's Procedural and Texture Based, image texture-based ones.

I prefer typically image texture-based ones

because I feel they often look a bit more photorealistic with things.

We'll also be leveraging a lot of textures from a great site

called ambientcg.com which has a bunch of nice CC0 textures to use.

I'll use this sand one here, which is a nice material

and this plaster one.

I have this plaster one downloaded.

Since we have the Node Wrangler add-on enabled,

I can quickly add some nice texturing to this.

To start, I will pull over this little side panel here

and make this my UV Editor to see our textures as we bring them in.

I'll Tab into Edit mode on this column, hit A to select everything,

hit U, select Smart UV Project, and OK.

Now you'll see it's projected over here. This is a bit small

so when we bring in our texture it'll look a bit too small.

What I like to do typically is scale this up.

I select all of this, hit S, and scale it up by 3.

That works well when you scale it up that way.

Now I can add in a new texture and we'll call this a Plaster material.

With our Principled BSDF selected, I can hit Ctrl + Shift + T,

and this now allows me to search for the texture I've downloaded here.

I have it loaded as Plaster 003

and I can select the normal, roughness, and color,

and that is all for now.

I won't use the Displacement as we don't need that on this column.

The Normal will suffice for us.

You have this blue button that lights up,

which is to set up a Principled Texture Setup.

Instead of importing these one by one and having to plug all the nodes in,

you can click that and it clicks everything into place for you

and gives you a nifty Mapping node with a Texture Coord node

using the UV Map that we've unwrapped before.

If I zoom in a bit on these columns, you can see that looks great. You've got some nice details here.

One thing to keep in mind while adding textures

is thinking about the scale of things.

Let me Tab into Edit mode on this and scale this down a lot again.

This is initially how our texture unwrapped

and it looks a bit too weird.

The column looks small scale because the texture is large here.

We want this to be much smaller so that it looks a bit more granular.

If this is hard for you to conceptualize and understand

how big texture should look on your screen,

reference and look at real images of columns,

look at our mood board, and look at some of our architecture

to see how the details of concrete and stuff look in your buildings

and emulate that with your texturing scale.

This is at a good scale here

and it's added to all our columns here, which is great.

That's one object down.

Let's add the same texture to the rest of our scene here as well.

I want this to also be on this building for consistency, so I will unwrap this the same way as before,

give it that plaster texture that we created,

and this is a great example of how scale looks funky on this.

That's looking massive, so let's select all of this

and scale it up by 3.

That's still looking a bit large and a bit too gritty here as well.

One thing that you can do to reduce that grittiness

is to turn down the Normal Map

that's pumping into our Normal output of the Principled BSDF

and giving the bumps.

If I drop this down to 0, you can see it's taken away some of that stuff.

Then, I can also pull out this Base Color,

but the issue with that is it's impacting our columns as well

and I liked how the texture and the bump looked on the columns.

If you want to make a change to a material

and it overrides everything, you can duplicate the same material

by clicking on this number here that you see.

That shows you the number of users of the specific data

and you can click for a single user copy.

If I click on this, it makes this Plaster.001 and so now this plaster material will be impacting our back wall.

You can see the column remains unchanged and our back wall is being changed.

Oftentimes if the material's looking crunchy on things,

I remove it from the Base Color

and it's still being impacted by the Roughness map and our Normal,

so it still has some nice details that you see if I zoom in.

There's a bit of denoising so it's muddling it up a bit

but you can see it's got some nice imperfections and details here

which looks great.

Maybe I'll up the Base Color a bit into the yellow

to somewhat match our scene here.

I'll maybe turn on the Saturation slightly.

That's looking great as well.

I'll add this to our stairs as well.

Our stair comes with materials built into it,

but I don't like the materials that come with the Archipack

so often I'll remove them like so.

We can add in that Plaster material.

We'll have to give this an unwrap

because there's some weird stretching there.

I'll Smart UV Project this as well. Once again, let's maybe use that Plaster .001 that we had before.

Scaling this up as well in our texture view.

That is our room textures down there.

That's looking great.

Now let's move on to the most complex texturing aspect here,

which will be texturing our sand.

This is what I practice quite a bit for a lot of my renders,

a nice workflow of making sand look realistic

and making various materials blend and look realistic like this.

This is the key to photorealism, breaking up the perfections of textures.

If I bring in the sand by default...

I'll do that to show you how this looks.

Let's bring in that sand texture from CC0 textures, this Ground 027.

I'll label this Sand and do the same as before,

Ctrl + Shift + T.

Then let's navigate to where I've saved my sand texture.

I've saved it under ground, SandGround.

I'll select the color,

normal, roughness, and ambient occlusion for now.

I'll come back to this to grab the displacement, but I'll start with these for now and plug them into my texture.

You'll see that it looks good.

I'll give this UV Unwrap as well and scale it up a bit

because those bumps look a bit too large.

Let's scale us up by 3.

That's looking reasonable.

This is a good start already here.

However, it is not matching how our references look.

The sand in our references doesn't look like that.

You can see there's so much variation in color and displacement.

This looks very smooth

because the water's been coming over and over on it.

You've got this little border here between the wetness and the dry

and you're starting to get a bit more bumpiness

with footprints, ridges in the sand, etc.

If I go even further over here into the beach,

it looks even a bit more like this like we see here,

so we want to break up that variation.

The way I like to do this is by using Vertex Color maps.

To access that and create one, go to your Object Data Properties tab.

If I click on this, we have a few options. We will be using this Vertex Group in a bit

to affect the displacement of our terrain too,

but for now, I'll start by adding a Vertex Color map.

I go down to this drop-down, hit Plus,

and it doesn't matter here, but we'll call this Wet Sand map.

What I'd like to do is group our textures here

and use the same one and make some variations to it.

I'll pull this up so you see what we do.

Let's isolate the sand in our render so we're not rendering everything

by hitting Ctrl + B and box selecting around here.

Now, this is just showing us our sand so we can focus on that.

With Node Wrangler enabled, we can do some shortcuts.

I use these to group textures together to see what we're working with.

If I select all of this and hit Ctrl + J,

it gives me a nice frame around our stuff here.

I can give this a color and let's call this Dry Sand texture.

This is our dry sand.

It's given a little label at the top so we can see that.

We can crank that label size up a bit more

so we can see what it is here too. That is looking good for now, so that's our dry texture.

Let me duplicate all of this by hitting Shift + D,

pulling this down, and giving this a different color.

Let's give this a bluish color and call this Wet Sand.

For the wet sand, what will make it work and look wet...

I'll hit Ctrl + Shift + Click on this one,

so we're seeing this result in our Material output,

not the dry sand.

It's impacting the Specularity, the Roughness,

and also the brightness of this sand.

If I go back to that reference, this is darker than this sand

because it's wetter,

so having that water from the ocean there darkens it up.

I can add a Bright/Contrast node to our Base Color

and let's pull the brightness back just a hair to -0.100.

That's already made a difference and made it similar to our reference.

Our wet sand here is almost perfectly smooth.

I'm bringing this Normal Map down to something like 0.100.

Having a slight hint of that bumpiness will give us a good result too.

I'm also turning up the Specularity a bit so it's a bit shinier. We'll maybe also give it a bit of Sheen here

so that on those top edges, it gives us a nice look.

We can also impact our Roughness map by adding a ColorRamp node

between our color output and our connection to the Roughness.

By messing with these, we can change how the Roughness of our material is.

Inverting these gives us an interesting look.

It gives a wetter look to our scene here.

This is looking closer to what I was hoping for.

Maybe we can bring the Strength down a bit more,

so it's almost perfectly smooth.

We can play with this and I encourage you to do so

and experiment and see what works.

I like that shininess here that I'm getting from this.

It looks nice.

It gives a shiny look to it.

It applies it to everything,

so we want to concentrate this to this foreground here

and have it transition nice and smoothly like in our reference to the dry sand.

How do we do that?

We will be using this Vertex Color map, and the way to see this is going up to the top left

and switching from Object mode to Vertex Paint.

Right now, everything is white color so we're not having any impact here

and we're also not doing anything in our Shader Editor to influence that.

There's a node I'll add here, which is a Vertex Color node.

I'll place this here

and in this little box, I can select our Wet Sand Vertex Color map.

I can pump this into a Mix Shader,

which will be outputting to our Material Output.

There's something that we need to do in the interim here

so that we can mix these two textures together

into our output.

That's by choosing a color for this.

I can go to this little drop-down color bar here, switch to RGB,

and we can use the Red, Green, and Blue channels on their own

to influence how these materials mix together.

Let's start with the Red since it's at the top.

With Red selected, I can click on Paint and Set Vertex Colors.

This makes everything on our mesh red. This entire Vertex Color is red here.

To get the red color channel from our color output,

we will be using a Separate RGB node

and put the color into this Image output.

Now, we have the option to select the Red, Green, or Blue channel.

For this, since it's red, we want the red channel

and we can use this into the Factor output.

When I'm using this Factor,

it's a perfect 50-50 split of these materials.

If I switch it to 1,

we only have our bottom material, which is this Dry Sand.

If I pull it to 0, we only have our top shader here,

which is the Wet Sand, so we want to influence that mix.

So, we'll use Vertex Color.

Now, it's just influencing the bottom one, which is that dry one

but we want to paint this to influence that mix.

To do that I can hold Ctrl, so now I can paint with black here.

Painting across here will influence the mix of our colors.

Now that I'm painting over the surface, it's changing things up

and we have that wet sand mixing into there and looking nice. We're getting a nice transition.

To scale this down, hit F and pull along,

and hit Shift + F to decrease or increase the Falloff of the brush,

so it's giving us a nice little mask here.

You can see that it's somewhat off black.

I usually do that for a bit of variation and imperfections on our surface here

so that it mixes nicely, almost irregularly like we see here.

It's not a perfect line, we've got these sandy soil curves going across.

It's nice to influence it that way.

I'll zoom back out here

and hit Ctrl + Alt + B to see everything again here.

Let me recheck on Render Region.

This is looking nice.

We've got this smooth Falloff to the surface here.

We've got a great look and that took a couple of clicks.

I encourage you to do this and add a different material too.

There are different sand materials here.

If I go back to Materials and the search bar and type in "sand,"

we have quite a few to work with. You can try mixing in some with rocks here too,

giving it some variation that way.

One thing that's not going on is we don't have any displacement.

My plane is still showing the sculpting we did before.

We will take this one step further and add a Vertex Group here to it

and we can call this Dry Sand Displacement.

We want to influence the displacement of this

similarly to how we did the Vertex Color map.

I'll go to the Modifiers and we need more geometry

because if I Tab into Edit mode, this is low poly, to begin with.

We don't have much to be able to displace our terrain.

I'll give this a Subdivision Surface modifier.

Let's give it a Subdivision of 2 so we've got enough to work with.

You can turn this down in the Viewport if it's slowing your computer.

You can always turn this on and off

to have it rendered in your Viewport or not.

We'll give it a Displace modifier on top of that and hit New.

Instead of Local, we want to use the UV Map that we did before.

Now we have this option down here, the Vertex Group, so I can select our Dry Sand Displacement Vertex Group.

Now it's not doing any displacement

because there's no texture influencing it.

Click on Show texture in texture tab and you can see there's nothing.

This is giving you a preview of what is using the Displace.

We want to use the Displacement map that we had

from our texture for the sand.

If I go over here and search "ground,"

you'll see this black-and-white Displacement map.

If I open that up, you'll see it load in the Preview

and we'll have some displacement going on

which will look nice.

Give this a second.

It's not showing anything because we have this little Vertex Group

and if I go to our Weight Paint, it's all blue.

Nothing is going on here.

If I were to delete this now, you'll see we have displacement.

This displacement is a bit crazy so we'll dial this in,

but let me add that back in.

I want to paint this displacement in just where it's that dry sand, we don't want it displacing the wet sand.

I'll turn this Subdivision off for now so it is a bit faster to color.

Similar to how we did the Vertex color, hold down Ctrl

and you can now paint the inverse of blue.

Paint like this.

The Strength is down, we want this at 1.

I can increase the size a bit here and there we go.

We can now paint it red.

If you look to the right,

it is now displacing our terrain where it should, which is great.

We want it displacing along where that dry sand is.

It looks nice.

If I zoom in, that's a bit too extreme.

We want to turn that displacement down a bit,

so I'll turn on the Subdivisions for now.

Let's pull the Strength down to 0.200, so it's slightly displacing it.

Maybe a bit more, 0.330 or something.

That's looking great.

We've got this working with that map.

If I go back into Object mode, you can see what it's done.

It's displaced nicely where those little ridges are.

I'll Shade Smooth to smooth this a bit.

There we go, we've got this nice Falloff.

When we add our wave texture on top of this, it will look even better and nice.

There we go, that area is all squared away.