Original subtitles

Hello and welcome back everyone to Stylized Environments with Blender for Geometry Nodes.

In the last lesson we left ourselves off with a nice UV setup for the well and now we're

going to actually make use out of them to get ourselves some stone texture.

But before we get into it I'd like to play a quick introduction video to the shaders

so we better understand how the material setup is going to work.

So we're going to go ahead and move with in regards to the well in the next lesson.

For now though, thank you so much for watching and I will be seeing you in a bit.

Welcome everyone to the Blender shading and texturing introduction.

And you can see here within my scene I've actually brought in a few shaders just to

kind of explain.

How they actually work. So first of all what is an actual shader? A blender shader is a type of

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material that can be applied to 3d models within blender. Shaders define the way surface of objects

appear under various lighting conditions, simulating a wide range of materials and effects

such as metals, glass, plastics, wood and more. Essentially shaders tell blender how to render

the surface of an object based on its properties like colour, transparency, shininess, texture

and reflection. So within blender we use actually a node based system for creating and customizing

shaders particularly within its powerful rendering engines like cycles and the newer

Eevee render engine. Now it's important to note that the actual shaders within blender react

differently to each of those shaders. So at the moment you can see that I've actually got this

on Eevee but the moment I put this to cycles these actual shaders, some of them at least,

will react differently.

So now you can see that our emission here that we had that was glowing doesn't glow anymore and that's what happens in typically in Blender cycles.

Also the glass now we can actually see through the glass and see this is actually a glass shader.

So it's important to know straight off the get-go that some shaders will work in Eevee and some in cycles.

Now next of all we need to look at the different types of shaders within Blender.

So some are created entirely in Blender through node systems which we're going to look at in just one minute.

And the others are created through textures. Generally these will be PBR textures.

Now a PBR texture is a physically based rendered texture and it's a texture map designed to mimic

the way light interacts with surfaces in the real world based on physically accurate models.

These textures ensure that materials react to lighting conditions in a realistic manner

making them essential for creating lifelike 3D models and environments within Blender.

So now in north of all the backstory on textures, let's actually go up then and first of all we want to bring in an add-on.

Now this add-on is in-built within Blender, in other words it comes with Blender.

I wish they would actually turn this on as standard but so far you have to actually enable it.

But trust me when I say it's one of the best add-ons that Blender ever produced.

So let's go up to edit and what we're going to do is come to preferences.

We're going to go over to add-ons and the add-on we want is called the Node Wrangler.

So type in Node, make sure the Node Wrangler is turned on and then all you need to do is just close this down.

Next of all we're going to go over to our shading panel which is this one over here.

And then what we're going to do we're going to click on this cube which at the moment

doesn't actually have a shader on it or any material.

We know that because if we come over to the right and decide where our material panel is here,

you can see this is completely empty.

Also in the shader panel you can also see if I zoom out this is also completely empty.

If you do happen to have a shader in here and then there's nothing in here just

zoom out as far as you can and then you'll find all of the nodes. Now what

I'm going to do first of all is add in a new shader and what we'll do is we'll

double click it and we'll call it wood, like so. And now you can see it has

actually set something up within Blender, just a basic principled BSDF. Now this

basically is the super node, it's where all of the texture maps will plug into.

This is the main node that you will be using. All right so now what I want to do

is I just want to click on this node and what I'm going to do is I'm going to

press ctrl shift and T and what then that will enable me to do is open up my

actual computer file and from there I just want to find my textures. So here

are my textures that I'm going to use as an example and you can see here we've

got wood grain and you can also check out what these actually look like by

coming over to the right hand side here and clicking this on and now you have a

good idea of what these are actually going to look like.

We can also make them larger as well if we need to, so you can see here at the moment the size is 128 and we can just bring that up to actually make them bigger and see exactly what textures they are.

Now to bring them in all I need to do is select the first one, shift select the last one so we've got them all selected and click principal texture and what Blender is going to do from there is it's actually going to bring them all in and set them up for us like so.

So you can see now because of the Node Wrangler everything is set up for us.

Now within our actual shading panel you will see over the left hand side we actually have a UV map here and it's not actually showing anything at the moment.

But if we come on over and we select one of these actual textures like so, you will see if I zoom out we've actually selected this actual metallic shader.

I can also come down and select the roughness for instance, I can select normal or I can select the actual image texture like so.

So just remember.

If it's on the wrong one it's probably because you've got one of the textures or the wrong texture actually selected and I generally want to have it on the base color.

Now with Blender 4 comes a new principled BSDF and now a lot of the options are actually hidden behind these little tabs here.

So emission for instance is now hidden behind here so I can turn this up as you can see, bring it down and change the color of it if I so want.

So just remember that some of them might actually be hidden.

Now because this is a basics video we're just going to go through a few of the actual options that we normally get within our actual textures.

So a PBR setup normally consists of a base color known as the albedo or cut just a color map, a metallic map, a roughness map and a normal map.

There are more maps but they take a little bit of work to actually set them up within Blender and this is a basics video so we won't be going into those but we will be going into those later on in the course.

So the first one which is the albedo map.

It just defines the basic color of the material without any lighting or shading effects.

It represents how the material looks under natural lighting.

If we go to the next one we've got metallic and this map defines which parts of the texture

are metallic and which are not influencing how the material reflects light.

Metals have a high reflectivity and distinct coloration in their reflections.

Now you will notice if I click on this one it's completely black

because this wood has absolutely no metallic.

If this was completely white all of this wood would be completely metallic.

And if it has kind of greys in there that then is defined the roughness of the actual metallic.

In other words those little spots that you see when you shine light on something.

The next one is roughness and this isn't to be confused with metallic

because roughness is how shiny something is and metallic is obviously how metallic something is.

Generally as well with metallic either something's metallic or it isn't.

You don't really get in the real world half and half.

So the Roughness Map controls how rough or smooth the surface of the material appears, affecting how sharp or blurred the reflections are.

A lower value results in a smoother surface with sharp reflections, while a higher value leads to a rough surface with diffused reflections.

Now when I'm talking about values, I'm talking about these values here.

So the more sharp this is, or the more blurred this is, or the more darker these little spots are, that will give you the result that you're actually looking for.

And finally we're going to go now to the Normal Map, perhaps one of the most important maps.

And the Normal Map simulates small surface details and textures without actually changing the geometry of the 3D model.

It affects the way light bounces off the surface, creating the illusion of depth and detail.

And this is used a lot in games to actually look as though there's more geometry than what there is.

Now let me show you how that works then. So if I come down to this strength, at the moment you can see that we've got our wood here.

And it's kind of defined, so if we look from here, it kind of looks like it's...

...you know, 3D and these little grooves are going in, but if we turn this all the way up now...

...you can see that's the effect we actually get. So you can see now it looks...

...as though it's much more ripply along the edges, we can see big grooves going down there...

...and this is what the normal map actually does. Now at the moment with our actual cube here...

...you can see we've only got one actual material on there, and what about if you want to put...

...multiple materials onto an actual object? So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to...

...click the plus button, I'm going to click the down arrow, and I'm just going to choose one like...

...glass, I'm going to click the plus button again, click the down arrow, and this time I'll choose...

...one that says stone. Now if I go into my cube and press the tab button in actual edit mode...

...come over, select one of these faces, it only works on faces by the way, you can't select an edge...

...and apply a material on there, you have to select a face or multiple faces. So what I'm going to do...

...then is come down to glass, and finally then I'll click assign, like so. Then I'll come around...

...to the other side, I'll click this face, and...

...this face, and what I'll do is I'll come down, click the stone, and click assign.

And there we go, now we've actually got stone, we've got wood, and we've got glass.

And if we put this on our rendered view now, you can see exactly how that's going to look.

And you can see how the light is interacting with all of these surfaces.

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If I come over just to the right-hand side quickly, and turn around my sun rotation...

...we can get a clearer view of what we're talking about.

If I come even further around and bring it to the front like so...

...you can actually see that glass then is actually starting to be seen through.

And you can also see the actual normal map working on the inside of this cube.

Now let's quickly go back to our wood.

So to do that, what I'm going to do at the moment, you can see...

...that we're probably on the stone in this one, in this shader view here.

It says actually stone here.

I can actually come down and click on my wood for instance.

And then it will take me and put the wood on there as well.

So that's another way to actually apply them.

Instead of the stone, it's actually just put on...

wood instead, as you can see. Now what I do want to do is I want to come in to my actual wood.

So that's the one that we actually brought in, this one here, and just show you for instance that

we can actually interact with all of these texture maps. Now there's thousands of nodes available in

Blender and the way that you put them all together, it can become extremely complex with huge 100 node

maps and shaders. So I'm just going to show you something of the basics just to get you started

and that will be an RGB curve. So an RGB curve, as those of you may know who use Photoshop,

changes basically how the actual image is actually lit. Darker spots, lighter spots, things like this.

So if I come in and press Shift A, search RGB, and you can see I've got an RGB curve here. Now just

before we do that, if you do press Shift A, you can come down, you can just see, get a flavor of

how many nodes there are actually within Blender.

And you can see also how many shaders there are within Blender.

Let's discuss that after, but first of all we're going to go with RGB Curves,

bring that in and drop that down like so.

And from here now you can see that I can actually affect the color of this actual wood

on the fly, in real time, like so.

We can also put this onto the Metallic, onto the Roughness and even onto the Normal

to get different effects and different ways that the Metallic or Roughness actually work.

Now the next thing is we want to discuss is just shaders.

So as I said, this is the main shader within Blender.

This is like the one ring of shaders and basically this will be the main one that you actually use.

But of course there's plenty of shaders, so depending on what you want to do,

if you come down you can see we've got Diffuse, we've got Emission shaders,

we've got Glass Glossy and a whole range of other shaders that you can actually try out and use.

Now that we've discussed that, let's actually come on over to...

...our actual shaders that I've got set up here. Now you can see with this glass one it's just a very simple shader of glass...

...and got some roughness on and of course an IOR value. Next of all then we've got an emission shader and you can see...

...now this is using texture maps and it's slightly more complex and you can see how all of these things plug in.

In other words what I'm showing you is that shaders can be very very simple or get to be very complex.

So the next one is the metal and you can see this gets even more complex.

The next one is stone and you can see again this is slightly more complex. And the final one is wood.

And you can see things like this. So we can see that we've actually got some edge wear on this wood.

And all of this is actually done within Blender, again with a quite a big setup for the nodes.

But it's unbelievable really what you can actually do with these shaders once you've actually got your head around how to set up the node systems.

Now we really are just scratching the surface in this Blender shaders and texturing introduction.

And even on the right-hand side here you can see you've got all of these options as well to play around with,

as well as the fact that you can actually put these into your asset manager as well.

But this is just a basic introduction just to get you started.

All right everyone, so I hope you learned a lot from that and I'll see you on the next one.

Thanks a lot, cheers.