Blender 2.79 Tutorial 4 : Blender Materials

well hello internet and welcome to part 4 of my blender video tutorial and this part of the tutorial I'm going to cover materials lighting textures simulating glass and numerous different examples all the files used here are available in a link in the description underneath the video as well as a full transcript of the entire video and I have a lot to do so let's get into it alright so here is blender and you can download this file so you can play around with it now what am i mainly be working with here is this sphere

so what I want to do is i'm gonna right select it and i turned on my display so you're gonna be able to see all the keys that I have right here now if we want to go in and change the material this is the place where we're gonna do that we're gonna click on that guy right there this is textures this is material so I'm gonna cover a little bit on textures I'm gonna try not to overwhelm you though alright so I selected that then I'm gonna come in here and click on new Cisse

it says right there add a new material so I'm doing that just on our little sphere that we have here and you can see a representation of what we have here now our material settings and there are a ton of them are going to define how simulated light and surfaces can be changed to simulate the look of metal and glass and cloth and skin and a whole bunch of other different things I'm gonna be using the blender render here right now and later I'm going to talk about the cycles render but I just thought I

start with a blender render which is the default rendering engine and these settings that I have here this is in object mode and then down inside of here I'm gonna have this set for solid just so you can follow along now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna open up the grease pencil over here and continuous and draw and I just want to talk about what happens when light hits an object now it is going to diffuse and what that basically means is it's going to reflect off the surface in many different directions depending upon

how rough the surface is so if our light is coming in on our sphere in this situation depending upon how rough it is that light is going to scatter in multiple different direction and that is considered diffusion now we have also what is called specular lighting and you're going to say see this says diffuse here and specular lighting here shading transparency mirror we're going to talk about all those now specular lighting is going to reflect the light in different ways depending upon how smooth the object is so diffuse is mainly rough Wow specular lighting is

going to deal more in regards to smoothing now with specular lighting we are basically defining what happens with the light hits our sphere and then shoots off in a consistent direction okay so those are going to be the different things we're going to be playing with here in this tutorial series another thing that happens when light hits an object is the object is of course going to reflect back its own color as well as surrounding objects if the object we're dealing with is highly reflective and also if an object is transparent it is going to

show what lies behind it as well as you know its own form and basically what we are going to do is we're gonna change the lighting and textures and camera angles and shadows and translucency and so forth to simulate a whole bunch of different types of materials so what I want to talk about here first is the different diffusion options that we have now of course you're going to be able to color your object so I'm going to come over here and let's say we want it to be like a bluish color and you can

see here that I also have let's switch over to the tools area here this is also set for smooth then under intensity what we're going to do is determine the amount of light to reflect to our camera so as this is lowered you can see that less light is being reflected and as it's raised you're going to see this there's more like being passed back I'm gonna cover ramp here later on this is basically going to be used to set a range of different colors and how those colors are going to vary from the outer

edge of our object and inward so I'm gonna give you an example of that later on and you're also going to see that we have different diffusion shaders here so we have Lambert and you can see what that looks like and here's an example of it right here basically it is going to allow you to define how much light is reflected of course like I said previously and I know I'm gonna butcher all these names I'm just not even gonna say them here sit well I'll say it there is Oren NIR and if we go

and select that what this is going to do is provide us the options to change the roughness remember I talked about diffusion and roughness you're gonna see as you play around with these different values how that is going to change for us and we can lower that as well to zero then we have the toon shader and here I jumped into rendering mode just so you can see example of that let's go back to the Oran air and let's go in here and change our roughness again you can see it's rescaling as I go and

draw inside here as I changed the roughness on it from zero the whole way up to 3.14 changing the shader once again and with this guy we're going to be able to darken parts of an object to simulate different materials you can see as I darken it how that is being affected quite dramatically and it goes of course from zero whole way up to two and then the last shader we have here is Fresnel and this is just going to change what is called the Fresnel effect which is going to define how ambient light or

light that exists around our object is going to affect our object and you can see as we increase that up to five which is our maximum and then we drop it down to zero and the changes we have there whoops drop it down to zero and then we could change the factor as well all the way up to five and the whole way down to zero so I talked about ramps so I'm gonna go and give you an example of a ramp I'm gonna go and select this and like I said before this is going

to define a color gradient across the whole entire object that you have defined here so what I want to do we have this guy right here and this is called the color ramp widget and right here we're going to be able to add different colors so we can just click on this guy right here and it creates what's called a color stop we can then go in and define specifically what those colors are going to be now I have one here selected first so we can jump between the different color stops based off of just

clicking on those so there is the first one this black one right here and then this one one is the middle one and then finally we have the final one over here let's go to the very first one which is set for black and let's change its color to something that's going to be it more easy to say here so I'm just gonna change it something extreme like this green and you're gonna have two different types of colors you're gonna have RGB which are just straight colors and then you're gonna have HSL and HSV which

are going to provide you with different saturation options so I have this set for green and then gonna jump over to the next color stop this guy right here and let's set this like a red let's take the color up a little bit more pink I guess and then I'm gonna jump to the next one right here and this is white and I'm gonna change this color as well and let's make this into a blue okay so pretty dramatic changes in colors as you can see right there so as you can see it is transitioning

between all of those different colors across star or sphere that we have here on our screen and we can go from our shader to normal and we can change this to our results which is going to be more of a flat tone and let's just go back and change it to normal we're also going to be able to come in here in the blend area and get some interesting effects if we click on add and then also subtract we're also gonna be able to come in here and flip these colors around so that we're going

to start off with the purple color and then go into the pink and then the green and we can come back and flip that again and now you see that the green gets more of an emphasis then we have what are called our interpolation options and basically what those are going to do for us is just to define how we are going to transition between all of the different colors using different functions and you can see cardinal and linear and b-spline these are just names of functions that are going to basically transition between these colors

in multiple different ways we're also going to be able to come down here for position and we're gonna be able to change the positioning between our color stops so let's come down here and move it down you can see how that is being affected pretty dramatically and of course we can select the different ones we have here let's go to the middle one and drag that down as well and so forth and so on let's change this to linear and let's change this back to mix to give it more of a smooth look we're also

going to be able to change the Alpha for this guy if we just click there and like I said before blend is just going to provide numerous different ways of blending the color across our color ramp okay so there is a bunch of stuff and I'm gonna turn that off because it's kind of distracting alright and you gonna be able to do similar things with our ramp here actually exactly the same things but this is going to be in reference to our specular lighting which like I said previously is going to represent the objects highlight

this guy right here now in regards to the different shaders that are provided for specular lighting you're going to have the Cooke torrance shader which is going to be used to give a plasti look as you can see right there the falling shader as I selected right there is normally used for skin and organic surfaces Blinn is going to simulate how light is going to bend whenever it is reflecting and the hardness down here that we're going to be able to mess with is going to make our light source glow smaller as the hardness of

our object increases and then also if we go in the opposite direction of course the highlight is going to get bigger okay and IO are down here which is an abbreviation for index of refraction is going to allow us to change how much the background is going to be distorted based off of the high light hitting the surface of our object that we have set here and of course there's more shaders we're also gonna have tune you can see that that's a very very stark highlight like you would see with a cartoon cell shading and

then you have Ward isotropic which is going to be used for things like metal and plastics down here where we see shading we're gonna have a whole ton of other different options we're gonna have emit which is going to define the amount of light to emit from our object you can see that that's getting more and more intense as we raise it and less so as we lower it let's lower it down a lot more ambient is gonna define how the different available scene lighting effects are going to affect our object we have on our

screen and just so you know if I come in here and jump out of the rendering mode and select this lighting up Here I am using a Sun lamp in this situation cuz I thought that from that basically worked the best for what I was trying to preview here jump back over into this guy and jump back into the rendering can also may have noticed down here where we have our shadow this is very stark that is because I'm using the blender render we're gonna be able to get cleaner shadows whenever we use the cycles

render but I just wanted to cover everything and that's the reason why I'm covering this also down inside of shading we're going to be able to change the translucency which is going to define the amount of lighting be find the object that is going to show through I can raise this not gonna see that dramatic I'm an effect however because we're going to mainly simulate transparency is down here in the transparency area which is the reason why it's called transparency if we come down here and click on shadeless this is going to make the lights

and shadows that we have here have no effect on our object tangent shading is going to intensify our highlight as you can see right there causing quite a mess and tangent shading does normally caused quite a mess so we don't really play with that very much and then we have cubic interpolation which is going to smooth the transitions between our light and shadow as you can see there it's very subtle but there is a little bit of smoothing that goes on there all right so now let's talk about transparencies and then I am going to

come in here and actually create or simulate glass inside of this scene using the glass that we created in a previous part of the tutorial let's come up here and change this guy so he's not quite so nasty looking alright so and it's also let's also increase the hardness on this object okay so now what I want to talk about is transparency and to get the transparencies to start to render or the to simulate transparencies we're gonna check this guy mask right here is going to mix the colors from the background along with the colors

of the object to simulate transparency Z transparency is also going to mix those object colors with the background colors to create a transparent look what I really want to focus in on is the raytrace now to make the object transparent first off you're going to have to go to the Alpha and lower it below one and as you do that more and more and more you're going to see that the background is going to show up say there is the background showing up behind our object Fresnel over here is going to define how transparent an

object is so we can increase that and you can see it's getting more and more transparent and you can see that's digging like right here in the center how transparent it looks it's a pretty cool effect specular in this situation is going to define how quickly light is going to be absorbed and we can use this to simulate thickness of an object we can and lower that and you can see that our object is looking more and more slight and increase it the whole way to one get that definition blend is going to blend between

our transparent and non transparent surfaces down here once again IOR is a reference to index of refraction and just to keep that simple it's just how much of the background is going to be distorted whenever it passes through our object so if we go and increase that you see a lot of distortion as we increase it and then as we lower it down gonna see much less okay and I'm just gonna keep it at one in this situation as we increase the filter option the more we do the more of the base color for our

object is going to overpower the scene as you can see as I'm raising it it is getting it to be a darker and darker blue and I'm just gonna lower that down to zero once again so it has less of an effect in that situation fall-off is going to once again give us or provide us the illusion of thickness for our object raise that and it makes the object seem more and more thick it's gonna look a little bit better whenever we go and have more complex objects like we whenever we create to the glass

which I'm going to do here very very soon limit is going to determine at what thickness and object loses its transparency depth is going to set the maximum number of transparent surfaces a light ray can pass through for our object and then over here with gloss as we come in here and change the amount this is gonna cause blurring between the object and the background behind it as you can see as I'm lowering that let's lower this below zero you're gonna see a lot of distortion kind of a little bit picky so I'm just gonna

go and get rid of that Ray's out the whole way up the one and then in the other two options that we have here for gloss is threshold which is gonna limit an object shapes influence on our gloss and then finally samples is going to define the complexity when determining blurriness kind of a messy type of thing and it's better to do some of these different effects using our cycles renderer which I'm going to cover it later on so now why don't we go in here and let's take the glass that we made in a

previous part of the tutorial and I'll show you how to use all of these different surface materials to actually make it look like made out of glass so here it is here is our glass that we made previously and I'm gonna make it look like glass if we go in here and render it you can see it looks nothing like glass so that's not good okay so the very first thing I want to do let's zoom out of here and find our lighting and I'm gonna jump over into object mode and I'm gonna select our

lighting right here and I want to use hemispheric lighting so I'm gonna go and check on this guy right here and I'm going to come down here and click on hemispheric okay so that's where I want that to be I'm gonna zoom out of this and I'm gonna have it actually line up with our glass that we have here in our scene I'm gonna change this to seven and line it up right around the center area of our glass now what I can have the lighting do is actually come in here and line up or

track the glass on our screen by issuing a constraint so once again you want to make sure you're in object mode hit tab to jump between edit and object mode then what we're gonna do is come over here where our constraints is say constraints pops up right here and click on that guy and add object constraint make sure you have the lighting set so I'm gonna click on that and I'm gonna say track to click on that I'm then going to target in this situation our glass is called Bezier curve because I never changed it

so just leave it like that and then I'm gonna set this to negative seven and then I'm gonna set this guy to Y you can see that the lighting is now coming down upon our glass and as we come like this you're gonna see that it's gonna make our glass show up much better on the screen and I might have to move the lighting up a little bit or down what have you but you can also see if I go and select the glass that we have here and move it around that the lighting is

going to follow it no matter where I put it so let's put it back there now what I want to do is I want to add a plane to our base so I'm going to come down here then we go shift a plane and I'm gonna come over this guy let's increase this a little bit and you click on N to make that go and come and leave and so forth and so on alright so the very first plane I want to have our location be zero on the X plane and I'm gonna set this

to negative 8 and then set this for positive 8 I'm gonna rotate it on the x axis by 90 90 degrees I'm gonna have this sort of be a wall that comes up next to it then going to scale this guy on the X plane by 8 and on the Y plane also by 8 and our overall dimensions are going to be 16 by 16 okay so now what I want to do is create another one well let's also create a plane here on the surface that we can use so a to deselect that and

let's create another one plane and let's move this into this area right here and then we're going to increase the scaling on this to 8 and 8 up maybe a little bit too much let's change it about 7 7 see if that works out better z and change that to 0 and let's take the Z and lower it down so that it shows up be low our glass changes to 0 move this guy into position and then like this and the scaling was right originally so 8 and 8 and once again move it down into

position and into position okay so now we have a plane on the side and then we're gonna put another plane over here all right so that lines up pretty good let's change this to 0 and 0 all right so good stuff a to deselect that then we're gonna create another plane and it's gonna go right here and then we will go and turn this glass we have here to make it look like it's glass so let's add another one and mesh and plane and this guy once again we're going to have this be negative 8

yeah let's put it over on this side instead Y is gonna be 0 Z is going to be 8 I'm going to rotate it on the x axis by 90 just like I did before rotate it on the z axis also by 90 there we go got that to fit in and then I just need to scale this so we're gonna scale it 8 & 8 and there we go now we got that in place all right so now we have our glass with the different planes everywhere so it's gonna line up a lot better

now what I need to do before I go and do anything else is we have to add materials to all these different positions so I have this guy selected so I'm gonna come over here click on materials and I'm gonna go new and I'm gonna give it like a brownish color just to give it some type of weird color maybe like that and let's lower it I was kind of looking a little bit good alright so got that I'm going to also add material here so new and material and let's go and give it sort

of a brownish color again but let's make it maybe a little bit darker than we had previously and then to do something fun let's go with this guy let's go just go new leave it with the default and then what I want to do is add a texture to it just to do something different once again the textures are right here so we can get a texture and I'm just going to use an image I'm going to cover more on textures later so I'm just going to come in here and go new texture and then

what I can do is I can have there's all kinds of different things that I can create all these different options we have here but I'm just gonna leave this be image and then down here I'm going to open up an image which is gonna be wood and whenever you're importing images you just want to make sure that the size of it is divisible equal by 2 so you want to basically import images that are gonna be 200 by 200 400 by 400 and so forth and so on I'm gonna go and open one of

those up so let's say I want to use a 400 by 400 wood that's selected that's a ping file we can come over here and render this out and you're gonna see there are our walls and there is our wood texture that we have underneath our glass maybe we want to change this a little bit go and select this guy jump back over in materials and maybe make it a little bit darker or some I don't know but and render it there that's a little bit more like what I was looking for now what I

want to do is I want to come in here and make the glass actually look like it's made out of glass so I got this inside of here I got that selected I'm gonna come in and I'm gonna go new under materials and I want to come in here to specular and for hardness and I want to set this to like 300 which is gonna give it more of a reflection so there we go change that to 300 then what I'm gonna do I'm gonna do most of my work down here inside of the transparency

here and I go and do rendering on this as well and change everything as I'm going so I'm going to select raytrace which is my favorite way to make things transparent remember we have to take our alpha down if we below one if we wanted to actually be transparent you can see that it's already starting to look like it's made out of glass let's just just to keep this simple let's change this to point one point one boom and you can see if we come in it's already starting to look like glass right they're a

little bit rough but what have you let's go and tweak a couple other different little things we have here let's go to Fresnel and let's change this to 5 maybe make this a little bit more see-through I O'War let's change this to like 1.25 see it's starting a little bit more bandy and our depth that's going to let's increase that to like 10 and now you can say this is whenever everything starts to get really crazy whoops let's go and zoom in on this whoops so you see now it's starting to look more like glass

and as I increase that depth it's going to look more and more like glass I could tweak and play with this all day and night I'm just gonna leave it like I don't know let's just change it to 10 and changing the background colors and so forth will probably help this out a lot I could also maybe come down here and play around with tangent shading which sort of emphasizes the highlights on our glass as you can see right there I don't know if I like that or not but there we go and there is

how we can simulate glass inside of render all right so later on I'm going to talk about this cycles renderer or like I talked about before it's a little bit better in regards to different rendering options but I just wanted to cover all of the different material effects and then touch upon lighting and texturing just to keep the overall tutorial interesting so hopefully you guys enjoyed that and found it useful and like always please leave your questions and comments below otherwise till next time