Become a Material Guru in Blender

This is the place where I say "Hello!" :)!

I hope you really will enjoy this course...and if you have any questions at all. Don't hesitate to ask!

This will explain what is needed to put together a basic material. After the session students will be aware of the separate pieces of the puzzle needed to make a complete material.

This is a standard setup if you want to create materials on a simple plane.

Adding the basic tile pattern and some Mortar Noise.

Time to make your node tree simpler by adding groups to it.

Adding the first basic structure for the tiles.

Time to add that "extra". First some variations on the mortar so it is not perfect.

Adding the final details, like reflection on the tiles and some bumps to make it look nice.

Here I go through how you can add snow on a mountain. Same techniques can be used to add smudge or dust on something.

You will learn:

- Using the Normal output from the texture coordinate and taking the Z-axis from that.

- Using the Generated output from Texture coordinate and how to combine it with a musgrave texture to get variations on the snow border.

- Using the Bevel Node to get snow on top of an object and how to spread that snow.

- Ambient Occlusion to get a softer spread of snow/dust on an object.

- How to combine two or more methods to get a descent end result.

You download the .blend files in the resources. It is zipped, so you need to unpack it before you can use it.

Vertex paint is an easy way to add smudges to your object and this session goes through that, but also how you can add manual paint to your object.

This is an exercise on creating masks using mainly the "Separate XYZ" together with ColorRamp to find and change the Z-axis.

Topics;

- Mask both for color and Shader using the Z-axis.

- How to use the MixRGB and Mix Shader.

- How you can use Vector Math (Add + Multiply) to add some distortion to your map.

- Use for the input "Tangent".

- Mixing Colors in different ways.

When you have an old nail going through a material, you would like it to be smudge around that area where the nail hits the material. Same goes for like a wooden pin going in to a building. It gets darker and more moister where the two materials meet. Here we will learn how to handle these situations and the first video is to setup a scene to demonstrate different methods for it.

The easiest way to change the main material using a secondary object is to add an Ambient Occlusion Node and this lecture shows how that works.

Reference another Object to set the center point on your material can be a powerful tool. Here we go through how that can be used to add smudge from secondary Objects.

Dynamic Paint is mostly used when doing animations, but work excellent even if you are doing a still image, so this is the third method shown when it comes to add smudge from secondary Objects.

This lecture goes through what UV is, how you add it to your object and also how to add and use multiple UV:s in the same material and on the same object.

This session will go through how you apply different materials on the same Object just by selecting the faces. You will also use UV to place an image on a specific place.

In this section you will do a crystal bowl filled with candy. The base model has all...except material.

It will be a repetition on glass and also about using the Object Info node.

In addition to the repetition, I will also go through the meaning of "Sub Surface Scattering".

NB! In the lessons I use 2.0 as IOR for the crystal bowl, since that is the value we find in the chart. However. In real life (After some investigation from my side), I found out that it should be somewhere between 1.56 and 1.6, so you are free to select that range as well if you want it to be really realistic. :).