Blender 4 Essentials: Material and UV Mapping

1. Introduction: This course is part of the Blender three D version for essential series in this course. You will learn three topics, material, texturing and UV mapping. I know that all of these topics might look complicated, but trust me, this course will make it easy for you. I have carefully crafted the curriculum so that students can gain the skills gradually with no friction at all. If you follow this course in order in Shao law, by the end of it, you will feel comfortable and confident working with textures and U V maps inside Bnder. A Salam Molcum my name is Wide Motakin, founder of Expos Studio. For more than 20 years, I have created thousands of TD renderings like this for architectural, interior and master plan projects. I have worked with many clients all over the world. I have clients on almost every continent in the world. Besides doing projects, I have also been teaching Tweed and computer graphics academically at various schools since the year 2000. In short, I have real world professional expertise in Tweed and teaching experience. In the material chapter, you will learn all the basics of working with materials in lender. From assigning and managing materials, learn some CG fundamentals such as color models and color codes. Learn the difference between metal and electric materials and learn all the features and potentials of the principal BSDF Shader. By the end of the chapter, you will have hands on projects composing materials for Ietin product and also some architectural objects. Next, in the texturing chapter, you will learn the fundamentals of Shader and texture. You will understand the difference between procedural and image textures and know how and when to use both we will then cover PBR textures in detail. At the end of the chapter, you will have hands on projects where you create texture for Avis model completely procedural. After that, you will create materials for a snowman model also completely procedural. In last chapter, you will learn UV mapping in depth, you learn different techniques of UV mapping and know how to use them and when to use them against different scenarios. You'll also learn UV editing, such as tweaking, splitting, stitching, UV sculpting, straightening, and so on. By the end of the chapter, you will have four hands on projects. First, you will add a texture to side table product, then you will work on previous nightstand model. But this time with a wood texture, and then you will add textures to this problem through the model. And finally, you will work on UV mapping un chair product. So join now and take your tudio skills with Blender to the next level. Have fun learning Wala Malekum. 2. Exercise files and other information: Welcome to the course. Before moving on, there are several important things I need to mention about the course. This course is the second course in a blender for essential series that I published on Skillshare in first course. We went deep into TD modeling. While on this course, we will focus on material creation, texturing, UV mapping, and a leader unitor course. You will learn lighting, camera, rendering, and post processing using cycles rendering engine. Although you can take this course directly, I strongly recommend that you take the first course before taking this one, especially if you are very new to vendor, because most of the time, I assume that you already know things that I already explained in first course. Just keep in mind that if you find something confusing and I don't explain it in detail, it might be that you miss out on lessons from the previous course. Next is about the exercise files. You can download all the exercise files for the course in the resources section of this lesson in case there is a problem, as a backup, you can also download the files from the following link. Please pay attention to the capitalization of the letters, as this link is case sensitive. You can download the files one by one, but it will be easier if you just click this download button to download them all in one zip file. The text you see here depends on where you are or your language preference. It says, download Samoa because I am in Indonesia. You will see the text download all if you are in US or UK or English speaking countries. As you can see, the files are named based on lesson with additional chapter code in front. If lesson has multiple exercise files, then I put them in a folder with the same name as the lesson. Next, it's about the structure of the course. I have carefully crafted the curriculum so that everything is spaced sequentially. Each lesson you take on one level will become the foundation of the lessons in the next levels. Therefore, it is important that you take the course in order step by step, not jumping around. If you take the course by jumping around, most likely you'll get confused at some point. The second thing I need to mention is that you need to practice. For each video, please try out the lesson yourself at least once. The course is not just about theories. Most of the lessons are practical skills. So again, you need to practice if you really want this online course to benefit you. In this course, I'll be using a PC computer with a Windows ten operating system. So every shortcut I mentioned in the video will be for PC and Windows OS. If you are using Linux OS, most likely, you won't find any difference in terms of keyboard shortcuts. However, if you are a Mac user, you will find some differences. I believe most Mac users already understand that the command key in Mac is often used to replace the Control key in PC. And the option key in Mac is often used to replace the key in PC. But the thing is about vendor. I found that most of the control shortcuts in PC in Mac mostly become this control key and not this command key, although there are some shortcuts still use dommand key. Essentially, if you are using a Mac computer, you may need to check the menu or the preferences window or the official vendor's online documentation for the keyboard shortcuts. In this course, I will use vendor version for 0.2 and an upgrade to version for 0.3 in the middle. So ADI features and shortcuts are related to these two versions. If you are watching this video and have vendor version five or six or higher, you might find some differences here and there. In such a case, I recommend you to check my course list, as I might have already released a new version of this course that is better suited for the version of vendor you are using. There are at least two things that you need to have if you want to work in vendor comfortably. First, you need a standard mouse with a scroll wheel. Usually, if a mouse has a scroll wheel, you can press on the scroll wheel to activate the middle mouse button. We will use the scroll wheel and also the middle mouse button a lot for viewport navigation. You want to avoid using minimalistic mouse products that do not have any scroll wheel or middle button. The second thing that you need is a full size keyboard. What I mean by full size is that the keyboard should have a numpad area. This is important because a lot of vendors navigation shortcuts are placed in the numpad area. Yes, there is an option in lenders preferences window to simulate the numpad keys, but that will be at the cost of overriding other important shortcuts related to three D modeling. So again, you really want to invest in a decent full size keyboard if you want to use bender for long term. Throughout the course, I may display images and videos. Some of these contents are not made by me. Please note that I am using them merely as references or for inspiration. I never claim that these images or videos are made by me. If I can find the owner's name, I will credit him or her by putting their names on top of the content. Otherwise, I will display image or video with the URL link of where I found them. As for stock images or videos, if I don't specifically state that they are made by me, most likely the copyrights belong to the respective owners, okay? 3. Blender UI settings: In this video, I want to discuss several blender settings that I use throughout the course. First is the theme. As you can see, unlike most users, my UI has bright colors. Personally speaking, the PI is much more comfortable on the eyes in the long run. But I find that it is a bit harder for my students to see what is going on on the screen if the screen is mostly dark. That is why when teaching, I set the theme to a bright theme. You do not have to follow the setting, but if you are curious how to set it up, you can open the preferences window and then open the theme tab and here you can select the blender light team. Okay. The second thing that I need to mention is about the world unit. I always prefer to use centimeters for measurement unit, as this is not too small and not too big for most interior and architectural projects. This unit setting is not an application level setting, but it is a profile setting. To set this up, you can go to the properties editor, then open the scene tab. Make sure this unit system option is set to metric, not imperial. And then this is the important part in the length parameter, we need to set this to centimeters. With this option, every time I type in line value, Blender will consider the value of centimeters. That is, if I don't put any unit codes behind it, Blender still respects other unit inputs. If we type in unit codes after the number, such as M M and KM or even imperial codes such as a single code for fit and a double code for inch, everything will automatically be converted to meters by blender, which is great. Sometimes though some add ons and some features still disrespect this unit parameter. So even if you set these 2 centimeters, we still need to input the value as middles. This does not happen often, but it is just something that you need to be aware of. Next, you may also notice that I have a square color picker instead of theaul circular car picker. This is just my personal preference because I use Photoshop for a very long time. I just don't feel comfortable using the default color picker. If you want to use this square type also, you can head over to the preferences no again. And then in the interface tab, you can find the option for the color picker type. I just square SV H. Okay? Now, while you are in this window, you may also notice that my resolution scale value is set to 1.2. Essentially, this is so you guys can see text much better in the video. If I set this to the default, one, the text becomes a bit harder to read. The last thing that I need to mention is how to reset values. Thenar has a lot of primeters. Sometimes after experimenting with features, you want to set them all back to the defaults. It will be too hard to memorize all the default values of each priameter. One way to reset a value is to right click on it. And it's like reset to default value. However, this method is too slow. Note that you can also use the backspace key. To use this method, you do not need to click anything. Simply move the mouse over the parameter or field that you want to reset and then press the backspace key on your keyboard. Just as an example, say, you play around with this roughness value, and then you want to set it back to its default, but forget what the number was simply move the mouse cursor over the slider and then press back space. Now you know that the default value is 0.5. Again, you can use this technique for all parameters in vender. 4. Viewport modes in Blender: In this video, we will discuss the viewport modes and how to fix missing texture errors in bender. Bender has four types of viewpot modes. You can see all of the icons on the top right corner of the T viewpod. The first one is the wireframe mode. This mode displays everything in wireframes, which is basically edges or vertices with no solid faces. This mode is useful when we need to select intricate vertices or hidden elements. The second mode is the solid mode. This mode displays the objects with solid faces. This mode is perfect for modeling tasks, as we only need to focus on the shape of the objects and don't want to be bothered with colors, textures, or lighting yet. Now, because this course focuses on materials and textures, the next two modes will be the ones we use most often. The third mode is the material preview mode. It displays textures and material effects on a viewpoint. But not so much of the lighting effects. So it is best for working on texture and UV maps. The fourth mode is the rendered view mode. This is the most complete and yet the most demanding mode in terms of computer performance. It displays all the textures, material effects, and even lighting. Mostly, you need this mode to preview the lighting or the overlook of the scene before rendering any images or videos. We may also need this mode to preview the materials if the materials have advanced lighting effects such as emission, subsurface, shin, et cetera. One thing that is unique about the rendered view mode is that it depends on rendered settings. These are the settings that you can access via the properties panel inside the render tab. By default, it uses the cycles rendering engine. And so what you see in the viewport now is rendered by cycles. If you change the setting to EV, for example, now it is DV rendering engine that renders rendered view mode. This will make the visual quality the same as the material preview mode. So yes, the material preview is always using V rendering engine. And if you change this to workbench rendering engine, now rendered view mode looks just like the solid view mode. For this course, you should always set these two cycles. And if you have a capable graphics card, set this also to GPU compute, so the rendering can be done faster. All right. Now, in certain workspaces, such as the UV Editing workspace, you may see a thinner version of the three viewport Editor. It becomes hard to access the four viewport modes. You have to direct the editor divider to the left to see the viewport icons. In such a case, you can use the Z shortcut instead to open up the viewport rendering by menu. So this is the WRFrame mode. This is the solid mode. This is the material preview mode. And lastly, this is the rendered mode. Now, although we are not going to discuss lighting in this course, I still need to explain the lighting setup that I used throughout the course in all of the exercise files that I provide, if you open the shader editor and activate the root mode, you can see that I created a Shader network for environment lighting. Essentially, it is a combination of a procedural sky texture and an EXR image texture. If you're rendering turn pink like this, this means that vender cannot find the appropriate texture. I provided the texture in a folder named EXR. It is just a free XR file that you can download from pohaven.com. So to fix the pin rendering result, simply click the open button here and select the EXR file I provided, feel free to also use other EXR or HGRI files if you want to. 5. Creating and assigning materials: In this video, we are going to learn how to create side materials in vendor. Please note that although benders materials are interchangeable between its different rendering engines, the parameters you see in a material panel are different. So for example, let's say you created a material called black metal with cycles rendering engine active. If you later switch the rendering engine to EV or bench, the material will still work. And some of the properties will be transferred automatically, which is great. It's just that the settings you see on each rendering engine will be different, even though you are still working on the same material. Throughout this course, I will be using cycles, so to avoid confusion, make sure that you also use cycles as the active rendering engine, all right. To create a new material in blender, you need to select the object to which you want the material to attach. Let's say we want to create a material for the default cube object. Make sure it is selected. Then in the properties editor, you need to open the material tab. Remember, it is the one with the bull icon, not the one with the globe icon. They may look similar at a glns, but the one with the globe icon is the wall tab. This is where we control the environment lighting. What we want to access now is the material tab. In this tab, we can see a list. This is the material list. Basically, all materials belonging to the selected object will be listed here. Currently, it is empty because we haven't created or assigned any material yet to the cube object. Now, if you switch the viewport to the rendering view mode, you can see that this cube object has a white color. So even though it does not have any material, blender is still able to render it. How is that possible? Well, that is because all objects that do not have any material will be given a default material automatically. This default material has a white base color. Once we send a material to that object, then the default white material will not be used anymore. All right? To create a new material, you can click on this new button. The new material will be placed at the top or as the first material on the material list. Notice that now we can see material parameters down here. Basically, everything that we see down here depends on the material that we select up here. You can rename a material simply by double clicking on its name in list, or you can also do that by editing it in this field. For now, let's name this material red. Of course, if you are doing real project, you do not want to name your materials with just the name of the color more about this leader. We call it red for now, just for simplicity. Next, to change the color of a material, you need to click on this color box in base color property. Let's change this to red so it matches the name. Alright in lender, as with other to the software or game engines, materials to the objects are different entities. They are not part of each other. So a material is not part of an object, and vice versa, an object is not part of a material. The way we use materials through the objects is by creating connections between them. We can link material to many objects, and we can also link one object to many materials. So for example, even though we created this red material inside the cube object, after the material is created, it exists in the scene and can be used by other objects. Let's say we want to use the same red material on the swear object to do that, simply select the Spear object. Then in material tab, you do not want to press the new button as this will create a new material. Tosign an existing material, you can click on this probe down button. Here, render this place all the available materials. If you already have a lot of materials in your scin, the list will be very long in such a case. You may want to use the search feature, so you can easily find and filter materials with specific names. Currently, we only have one material which is this red material. You can use a material simply by clicking on it. As you may notice, the sphere object is now red also, as it uses the same material as the cube object because both objects are now linked to the same material. Any changes to the material will be reflected in both of them. Just to prove this, if I change the red material based color while in sphere object, Now the color of the cube object also change automatically. Again, this is because they are both linked to the same material. All right. Until now, we know how to assign one material to many objects. But what if we want to have multiple materials linked to a single object? Let's say we want to add a green colored material on the sides of the cube object. For this, make sure the cube object is selected, and then in the material list, you need to click on this Bruce button. Basically, the Plus button will create a new empty material slot. You can add as many material slots as you want by clicking on the Plus button. Although you can do this, it is better to populate the material list with only material slots and materials that you need. Why? Well, first, it will consume your computer's memory needlessly. And second, it will either confuse you or your teammates if you are working as a team. To remove a material slot, simply select the one you want to remove and then click on the minus button. Now, these material slots are useless unless you fill them with materials to fill a material slot with a material. You can click on a new button if you want to create a new material. If you only want to use an existing material, you can click on a drop down button and then choose the material that you want to use. We don't have many options to choose from now. So let's create a new material instead. Let's name this one green and then change to be color to green. Notice that although we have just created a new slot and a new material, nothing happened to the cube object. Why is that? Well, to assign multiple materials to single object besides creating the material, you also need to assign the phases manually. For this, you need to go to edit mode. Make sure you are in a phase mode. You can select a phase or multiple phases depending on your needs. Notice that in edit mode, the materials panel now shows three buttons that we didn't see before when we were in the object mode. To assign this material to the selected phases, you need to press the assign button. As you can see, the cube object now has two different materials red and green. From these examples, we can conclude that the first material we sign or the first one list will automatically be applied to all phases belonging to the object. But for the material on the second slot and beyond, they will not be applied automatically. For these slots, you need to manually select the phases and then press this sign button. 6. Managing materials: After we learn how to create side materials in this video, we will learn more techniques to manage existing materials. First, let's discuss how to replace materials. For example, we want to replace the material of the sphere object. For this, make sure the sphere object is selected, then go to the material tab. Here, you can see a number which is currently two. This number indicates the number of users. In other words, the number of objects that use the red material. If you want to replace the red material with other existing material, you can click on a rope down button and then choose another material from the list. But if you want to create a new material, you can click on the button here. Remember that this button is not for bleeding the material. It is just for removing it from the material slot. So red material still exists in the scene. Now that the slot is empty, we can create a new material by pressing the new button. Let's name this one blue, just for example, and let's also changed the base color to blue. All right. Now, if you select the cube object again and then select did material, the number displayed here is now gone. This is because currently only the cube object uses direct material. No other object in scene is using it. I am sure you get the idea. Up to this point, you may be wondering, how can we delete materials in lender then? The only button that seems to be for deleting material is not actually for deleting materials. Well, in Blender, there are actually two methods that you can use to delete materials. The first is the automatic method, and the second one is the manual method. The first method or the automatic method is always on by default. Blender takes care of this for you in the background, so you don't have to worry about essentially, if you have a material with zero users, then that material will get perched or deleted the next time you close and reopen the file. For example, let's say we change our mind. We want to use the green material for the sphere object. We can select the sphere object, then in the material tab, we can switch the material to the green material. At this moment, the blue material still exists in a scene, although no object is using it. In vendor's terms, it has zero users. If you save enclose this file and then later open it again, don't be surprised if you cannot find the blue material. So to recap, most of the time, you don't need to bother the leading materials. Why? Because vendor will do this automatically, Allright? The next question will be, what if we want to force vendor to delete certain materials right away? We do not want to wait for the next time we work on a file. For this, you can use the second approach, which is the manual approach. There are two ways that you can delete materials manually in vendor. The first is using the perch command, and the second is via the outliner. To use the perch command, you need to make sure that the material has zero users. You cannot porch materials that are still being used by an object. So in our case, we can only perform perch on the blue material. To perform the perch command, we can open a file menu, then go to the cleanup sub menu and then oe porch unused data. Please note that this method will perch all unused data, not just the materials, assets such as textures or images, brushes, word lighting. Fonts and so on, will also get deleted. That is, if they do not have any users. The second manual method for deleting materials is through the Outliner editor. Please be cautious when using this method, as it can remove any assets regardless of whether they are being used or not. In the previous class, we learned how to work with collections using the Outliner editor. Well, all this time, we only have been using a display mode called the view layer. In this mode, we can show and hide objects in SN. So essentially, we use this mode for controlling visible objects or objects that have TD coordinates, such as meshes, lights, bones, et cetera. This mode is not useful for managing non TD objects such as materials. If you want to manage materials, then you should use another mode called Blender file. Now, the outliner displays all assets belonging to the current file. Blender neatly categorized the assets in a folder like structure. If you open the materials folder, you see a list of all materials in the file. You can even see how many users the material has in this view mode. To delete the material, simply right click on the material. And then choose Delete. You can also select multiple materials using the shift or control keys, just like you normally select files in a file explorer, and then Right click on one of the selections and then choose delete to delete them all. Again, I need to remind you that this method will delete the materials regardless of how many users they have. If you are not careful, you may end up with three objects with missing materials. Now, you might be wondering, what if we went the other way around? What if we want to preserve certain materials from getting perched by vendor when we close the file, perhaps you don't need the material now, but you have plans to use it later to preserve a material, you need to add a fake user to it. You can do this either via the outliner or the properties editor. You are still in the outliner, you can simply click on the material and then choose add fake user. Notice how the shelled icon becomes active when the material has a fake user. In this condition, Blender will not remove this material when re close and reopen the file. If for some reason, you want to return the material to its normal state, you can Right click again and then choose clear fake user. You can tell that a material does not have any fake user from its sheld icon that looks hollow. If you prefer to do this in a properties editor, then you need to load the material first. For example, you want to preserve the blue material. Temporarily, we can switch this green material to the blue material. Then simply click on the shield icon to add a fake user and to protect it from getting purge. After you are done, you can switch the material back to its original, which is in our case, the green material. As you can see, the result is the same as adding a fake user through the Outliner Editor. 7. Color models: In this lesson video and the next one, we will cover the basics of color models. When you click on color box inside bender, you will see these steps are fail or GB, HSV, and hex. If you are wondering what they are, well, these two lessons will try to give you the answer. Although we will be using bender for most of the examples, the insight you gain from these lessons will also benefit you later when using other Tweet or CD software in general. Color is perhaps the most important aspect in creating beautiful art and design. There are so many colors and color variations in wold. For centuries, people have tried so hard to uncover the secrets behind colors. Why is this so important for us? Because by knowing how colors actually work, we can capture them, store, energitize them, reproduce them, or display them precisely. Essentially, we need to simplify the colors to their basic components which are called the key colors. Using the combination of these key colors, we can reproduce any color that we want. This is what we call the color model. So basically, color models are methods of describing colors using a combination of key colors or using a set of parameters. There are two types of color models, light based color models, and pigment based color models. Light base color models use lights as the color producer. All devices that produce light use this color model. For example, computer monitors, smartphone screens, televisions, projectors, et cetera. There are two light base color models. We are going to discuss in this lesson video. They are RGB and HSV. The next type is the pigment based color model. Unlike the light base color model, the pigment based color model uses inks or pins to produce the color. Everything that is printed uses this color model. The most common pigment based color model is CMYK. Let's discuss the light base color models first, and then later the pigment based color model. RGB, as I mentioned earlier, is the color model for lights. RGB stands for red, green, and blue. By using these three key colors, we can produce any colors that we like. If all of the colors, red, green, and blue turned on to their maximum strength, the output color will be white, and if none of the RGB colors are turned on, then the output color will be black. So basically, in the RGB color model, black means or no lights at all. If only the red and green colors are turned on, then the output color will be yellow. If the green and blue are turned on, and the red is off, then the output color will be cyan. If the red and blue colors are turned on, while the green color is turned off, then the output color will be purple color. If the strength of each channel is uniform, then the output color will be gray scale colors. Other colors can be produced by controlling the strength of each channel. Okay, so that is the RGB color model. Now, although RGB is the true color model of light, using RGB sliders to pick a color is very unintuitive. We need to do a lot of guessing or trial and error. That is why another type of Light B color model was invented called HSV. HSV stands for hue, saturation and value. It is light base color model derived from the RGB color model, but unlike RGB, which divides the color into three main key colors, HSV uses color characteristics to define color output. The first is hue, which is basically a color wheel. It is called a color wheel because it is rotation value 0-360 degrees. In blender, however, the value is converted to a zero to one scale. You can see this better efficient the color picker back to the circular type. If you scrap the hue slider, you can see how the pointer rotates. Zero is basically the same red color as one. Next is saturation, which controls how much color is present as opposed to gray scale colors. If you set this to the maximum value, the color will be at the strongest saturation. And if you set this to zero, there will be no color at all or basically makes everything in a gray scale spectrum. Changing this saturation slider is the same as dragging the color pointer up here from the center to the border area. The more we move the pointer toward the center, the less saturated the color will be. Okay? The last one is for value. Please note that in other software, sometimes it is called, which stands for brightness and L for level. So basically, the terms HSB, HSV, and HSL all refer to the same color model. Yes, some software may implement this three a bit differently, but we can assume that they are the same as the way we use them are practically identical. Essentially, the value component controls how much light is being emitted from the color. Changing this value slider is the same as dragging this slider up and down. If you set this all the way to zero, we will have black color because in light color model, as I mentioned earlier, black means rock or no lights at all. Now, if you are wondering what Alpha is, this is an additional channel that controls the opacity or how transparent the color is. If you're using cycles or AV, this Alpha value does not matter. It will not change the opacity of the object. You can use the colors of a channel to control objects opacity if you're using the workbench rendering engine. Okay? So to recap, if you are using the circular color bicker, rotating the pointer is the same as changing the hue parameter. Moving the pointer closer or further from the center is the same as changing the saturation primeter. Finally, dragging the slider is the same as changing the value primeter. All right. Let's change the color picker back to the square as we age. If you are me and prefer the square color picker, you can find a hue using the slider. Then to set the saturation, you can drag the pointer left and right. And finally, to set the brightness or the value, you can move the pointer up and down. So that is basically how you can select a color using the HSV color model in ender. Let's continue our discussion on color models. The third color model is the CM ike color model. Unlike the two color models we have just discussed, CM wiki is a pigment based color model. If you own a color printer, most likely you are already familiar with CM ik because the ink cartridges of the color printer are based on this color model. Long time ago, we used to think that the key colors of pigman or paints were red, blue and yellow because a lot of colors can be produced by mixing these three colors. Some art schools even still teach this concept until now. Although you can achieve a lot of color variations with red, blue and yellow paints, you cannot produce all of them. Scientists have already discovered that Bigman ki colors are more likely to be C white C for sine color and formgenta color. Y for yellow color and K. Well, K actually stands for key color. But because most of the key colors are considered to be black in the printing industry, we can safely assume that K is for black. We need the black color because cyan magenta, and yellow colors, when mixed together, can only achieve a brownish mud color. They can never achieve through black without a dedicated back ink. Now, you might be wondering, are there any other Bigman based color models besides hike? Actually, there are, but mostly, they are not commonly used color models, and they are proprietary to certain printer companies. Some printer manufacturers release color printers that use more than four color components. They have unique color models but are still based on the same Waike color model. For example, a six colors hexacron printer uses Sim Waike inks plus dedicated orange and green inks. Another type of six color printer uses the dark light method, meaning, besides the Sim Waike inks, it adds a lighter sheade of cyan and a lighter shade of magenta. There are also digital printers that use eight or more base color inns and so on. In this course, because we are focusing on three D computer graphics, we are not going to use the same Wiki color model. As we all know, three graphics are always displayed on screens that all use light base color models. Yes, you can render an image and then print the image using a same Wiki printer. But commonly, you do this through a two Di graphic software. This is the reason why in dender you won't find a simoke car model or car picker, like the one you can find in For Shop or other Tod graphic software. 8. Hexadecimal color code: When working with colors, you will often see people sharing colors using hexodeimal codes, especially if you are doing web design, most likely, you already use these hexadecimal codes to define colors in HTML or CSS codes. If you open Vendors color picker, you can see the hex field here. This is basically the hexodeimal version of the active color. Usually, we can tell that a code is in hexodeimal because it is preceded by a hash mark or shop symbol like this. In this video, we are going to discuss the underlying structure of these hexodeimal color codes. Hopefully, after this, you can use them confidently and be able to change the color just tweaking the numbers. Quick explanation first, these hexodeimal codes are used to represent RGB colors. The code can be divided into three groups, each with double digits. The first two digits are for red color component. The second two digits are for the green color. Lastly, the third two digits are for the blue color. In Lender, however, you can see that the hexadecimal codes are eight digits, not six digits. Well, the last two digits are for the Alpha channel or the opacity level. You don't need to worry about this because if you copy a x color code from other source with the standard six digits and then paste it in this field, then we'll put additional FF code behind it automatically. So you will get your color correctly and will not produce any error. FF means that the color is fully opaque, right. Now, you might be wondering, how come we have these numbers and letters all mixed up like this? Well, the most standard form of digital images is in RGB eight bits per channel. We call it eight bits per channel because each channel gets eight slots or digits. And in each slot or digit, we can have a binary value of zero or one. Now, if we divide these eight bits into left wing and right wing, we have four digits on left and four digits on right because we have four probable spaces and each with two possible values, we can calculate the maximum number of variations we can have, and that will be two powers by four equals to 16 variations each. Okay? So each wing can have a value 1-16. But if we start from zero, then we get zero to 15 values. The idea here is, how can we write each of these wings with only one digit? Not for digits like this as when we are using binaries or not using two digits like this as when we are using the symbol. The answer is by writing a value in hexodecimal. So what is actually hexodeimal well, we all know about decimals, right? We count from zero, one, two, three, up until nine. Then after we reach ten, we are doing loop, we are back in zero, then 11, 12, 13, et cetera. Basically, using the decimal system for each tenth value, we are looping the counting order. This behavior exists mostly because we as humans have ten fingers. Now, let's imagine this for a second. Let's say you encounter an alien race that has 16 fingers instead of ten. How do you think they will count numbers using decimal system? Not likely big chance. They will use hexardisimal system. The hexariimal system looks the counting order, not when it reaches the amount of ten, but when it reaches 16, now, if we borrow this system, we can use only one digit for referring to the value of each of these wing. But wait, we still have a problem. We don't have number symbols greater than nine. How can we symbolize numbers like ten, 11, 12, until 15 in hexadiimal then well, we can hack it. We can use letters instead. So as decimal goes like this, one, two, three, four, until we reach nine. After that, we have ten, 11, and so on. In hexadecimal, we have one, two, three. Up until nine, we still have the same symbols here. But when we reach ten, we use letter A then B 411, C for 12, and so on, until F for 15. When we reach 16, then we have ten. So ten in hexadecimal value is equal to the amount of 16 in decimal values. Okay? So by using the system at one digit space, we can have a minimum value of zero, which is equal to the amount of zero also in decimal. And a maximum value of F, which is equal to the amount of 15 in decimal. Now, with only six digits, we can define any RGB colors that we like. Sometimes you may also encounter three digit color values or also known as the web save colors. Please don't be confused with these codes, as basically they are double values. For example, if you have 37 A like this, the real value of this code is actually 3377 AA so three, double seven and A. Please note that the websaf color is a legacy of the old days standards when computers still have limited colors and also limited bandwidth. Nowadays, they are really not important at all. Sepal hints when working with hexadiimal values, when all of the values are zero, either six digits like zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, or just 000 using the websaf color format, both of these numbers mean black. As in your RGB color model, no light means black if we have all the values set to F, such as FFF or FF FF, FF, this means that the color is white. White is the strongest color as all of the RGB channels are set to their maximum values. Next, we also can tell if the color is gray scale, and that is when each number of GNB values are identical. So for example, 12, 12, 12 like this or E E or CCC, all of these are gray scale color values. 9. Shader basic concepts: In this lesson video, we will discuss the basic concepts of shaders, principled BSDF and materials. When you create a new material in blender, by default, the material will have a shader type called principled BSDF. This is the standard shader that you can use for almost all of your needs when creating a scene in blender. We have created materials before, but we haven't touched on what a shader actually is and why the default shader is called principled BSDF. A shader is actually a program or code that tells computers how to render to the objects on the screen. Please note that you don't need to write a single code to use shaders in blender. You can, but you don't have to. Most of the programming works for common types of shaders are already done by the Blender Foundation, and this course also does not cover shader programming. Again, most likely, you will only need to use the principal BSD of shader for almost all materials in your scene. The only reason you want to create or compose your own shader is because you want to achieve nonstandard rendering effects. For this, there are two approaches that you can take. The first approach, which is easier and faster, is mixing the existing shaders using nodes. If you click on Shader name, you can see that there are about two dozen shaders available in blender, other than the principal BSDF. You can find different shaders for different needs. There is a glass shader that can generate reflections, a glossy shader that can generate reflections, a hold out shader that can create fully transparent pixels in rendering image, a metallic shader for generating colored reflection and so on. You can mix different types of shaders using a special shader called the mixed shader. This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are still many shader features that are not listed here. For mixing or altering shaders using nodes, you need to use a special editor called the Shader Editor. Although it seems too simple to alter shaders using nodes, you'd be surprised at how powerful this technique is. Essentially, Shader node editing can mimic how shedder programming works. It is just that you are doing it visually like an artist instead of typing the codes directly like a programmer. We will cover more about Shader node editing in later lessons in halo. The second approach, which we won't be covering in this course, is to write your own shader using codes. Again, you only need to do this if you have very specific needs that are not covered yet in standard shaders and cannot be done just by using the nodes. In general, you can write shaders using different languages. Different software may have different ways of creating shedders, but the easiest way to write a shedder is using a specialized shed language such as SL. YSL stands for open Shading language, which was developed by Sony Pictures Image Works. Currently, SL is the only shedding language supported by blender. Next, let's discuss what principal BSDF is. As I mentioned earlier, the principal BSDF is basically a shader. It is the default shader in vendor, as it can accommodate almost all our needs. It can create reflections, reflections, simulate roughness, metallic effects, glow effects, you name it. One of the biggest benefits is that it can be exported seamlessly to other software such as game engines. I use and rear engine a lot for creating real time or the animation for architectural visualization. Believe it or not, although I render this to the animation using real engine 5.5. Most of the materials you see here are not created in Unreal engine. I created them in vendor using the principled BSDF. Almost all of them transferred to real engine with no issue. The only two materials they don't need to recreate in real engine are the glass material, and glo effect material also known as emissive materials, and that's it. So again, you should always try to stick to principle BSDF if you do have plans to export your project to game engines such as real engine. Until this point, you might be wondering why on earth is it called principle BSDF? Why not just call it default material or other similar user friendly names? Well, the BSDF itself stands for bidirectional scattering distribution function. Long story short, it is called bidirectional because it calculates both reflected light rays and reflected light rays. For those who don't know, fraction is the term for when light gets reflected or bonds off of a surface, while refraction is the term for when light goes through a transparent surface and then gets bent along the way. Every shader that uses the words BSDF means that the shader handles both effects, okay? Now the word principle is used because the shader was created based on reward physical principles. The origin of these principles is actually a research paper released by Disney animation studios back in 2012, and then in 2014, you can still read the paper by following this link. Essentially, the paper describes how shaders should behave if we want them to look realistic. This paper also popularized the terms PBS or physically based shading and TBR or physically based rendering. This paper is currently a decade old. Nowadays, almost all texture providers are using the PBR standards, and so the textures we get from these sites can be easily used with the principal SDF Shader, all right? So what is the difference between shaders and materials then? Simply put, materials are bigger in scope compared to shaders. We name them materials because that is we like to think about them as compared to real world materials. We can create a material for certain wood type, marble, metal, glass, liquid, et cetera. For a material to work, it needs at least one shader. A material is impossible to exist without working shader behind it, and on the other side, you can create a material that contains multiple shaders. Now, besides shaders, material can also contain textures. The term textures into the computer graphics are basically images. They can be in JPEG, PNG, TV, UXR or any other image file formats supported by Blender. We call them textures because these images usually represent the look of an object. Note that having textures is not must for material to exist, so you can have materials without any textures, just like how we created the red, green, and blue materials before. 10. Metallic parameter: Starting from this video, we will discuss basic parameters that exist in a default material or one that uses the principle BSDF shader. But before we discuss the material, let's create a monkey head model, press Control two to automatically add a two level subdivision modifier. Basically, a subdivision modifier smooths out a mesh model by dividing its faces. We can also change the shading mode to smooth to make it look even smoother. Next, we can activate the Renred viewport mode. But turn off the SIM vote option so that vendor just uses the default HDRI image to light up the viewport. Finally, let's create a new material for the monkey head object. All right. Note that we can preview how the material will look like in the preview section, but we will close it for now since we are already using rendered mode in the viewport. Previously, we learned how to pick a color for the base color. We even discussed RGB, HSV and hex codes in depth. For now, let's make it red. And let's turn down roughness to around 0.2. Don't worry. We will discuss the roughness parameter in the next video. We are now going to focus on this metallic parameter. We briefly talk about PVR or physically based rendering principles in the previous lesson, based on a PBR principle. All materials involved are divided into two categories, metal and nonmetal, also known as dielectric. There are no materials that sit between these two categories. I mean, there are no materials that are half metal and half dielectric. It simply does not exist. So ideally you only need to set the metallic value all the way to the left for dielectric materials, and all the way to the right for metallic materials, there are minor cases where you can set the value half way, but we'll cover that leader in a video. I believe we all know what metal materials are. Several examples of metal are iron, aluminum. Gold, silver, brass, and so on. And for the electric materials, pretty much everything that we see in this world that are not metals are examples of them materials like wood, dirt, water, fabric, rubber, plastic, ceramic, marble, you name it. So likely, more than 90% of materials in this world are dielectric materials. There are many specific traits that differentiate between the two groups. Not all of them are related to how we compose materials, though. For example, all metals are conductors. In other words, they are good at transferring electricity, while the electrics are the other way around. They are called insulators or are very bad at transferring electricity. You can search online to learn more about these differences if you are interested. What we want to focus on now is only their visual properties in terms of color. Only dielectric materials have diffuse colors. Diffuse color means the true color of a surface without any zeros, highlights, reflections and refractions affecting the surface. Metallic materials do not have any diffuse color. You may be wondering now, but what about gold and silver? We can clearly see that gold is yellow, and silver is white. Well, the colors that we see on metal materials are actually tinted reflections. They are not diffuse colors. So a gold, for example, receives light from the surrounding and then reflects them back to our eyes while adding a yellow color to the reflection. We cannot see the gold's diffuse color as it does not have any. In lender, however, implementing color in a default material is quite simple, regardless of if they are metals or not, we only need to set the base color. If the material is a dielectric, then the base color will act as a diffuse color. But if we set the metallic to one, which makes it a metal material, the base color now acts as thin color for the reflection. What I want to emphasize now is that we determine whether the surface is metal or non metal is not based on a volume of the object, but only on the surface of the object or what is visible in rendering. For example, if you paint on iron fence with normal paints, then the surface of the fence is no longer metal. So when you create a material for the fence, you should set the metallic value to zero. Another example is a mirror. You might think that a mirror is not a metal because it is made of glass. This is not true. The reflection we see in a mirror comes from the metal sheet behind the glass layer, not from the glass itself. So when you create a material for a mirror, you should set the metallic value to one. And for a clear mirror, you want to change the base color to white. Also, turn the roughness all the way to zero or very low, such as 0.1. You can use the same settings also for chrome or stainless steel. I mentioned earlier, there is no such things as half metal or half electric materials. But visually speaking, we can put layers of the electrics on top of metal or the other way around. We can layer metals on top of a electric. For example, if we have a metal surface covered in dust, regular dust is not metal. It will be nearly impossible to model each of the dust and give them a electric material. In such a case, it is a lot easier to just die out the metallic slider a bit to the left. As you can see, now it looks that the metal is dirty due to dust. Another example is carve paints. Although card bodies are mostly made of metal, the paints we put on card bodies are not metal. This is true for common car paints. So you should set the metallic value to zero. Let's try black or a very dark gray color. Okay. Now, when you put metallic car pain, this will be a different story. Let's try a purple color now. The way people manufacture metallic paint is usually by mixing ordinary paint with speckles of aluminum or other reflective metals. This is what actually makes the pain look more shiny or reflective. But still, it is not as reflective as the full metal surface. So if you are creating a material for metallic paints, you can use a value 0-1 for the metallic parameter depending on how strong the metallic effect of the pain is. I 11. Roughness, Alpha, Transmission, and IOR: In this video, we are going to discuss for more material parameters which are roughness, transmission, Alpha, and IOR. First, is the roughness primeter. As the name suggests, the roughness primeter determines how rough or how smooth a surface is. Before the PBR standard, most the software use separate values to control the roughness and the reflection. This is not physically correct. In the real world, all objects are actually reflective. That is why we can see them. We can see objects because they receive lights and then bounce the lights off to our eyes. The real reason why we perceive an object as reflective is because at the microscopic level, the object surface is almost flat, and so light rays can travel and bounce off almost uniformly because the reflection forms a clear image, we categorize the object as reflective. On the other hand, when an object has a rough surface, meaning that at the microscopic level, the surface has a lot of tiny mountains and valleys. The light rays that hit the surface will bounce off more randomly. Because the reflection does not form a clear image, we categorize the object as nonreflective. So again, in the real world, reflection and roughness are tied together because the PBR standards are based on real physics. It is easier than before, as we only need to control the roughness slider. We do not need to control two different values like before. If we need to create a reflective or glossy surface, then we lower the roughness value zero means that the surface is perfectly glossy. You may want to use this zero value only on glossy things like glasses, diamonds, mirrors, and so on. No so the reflection is very strong on low roughness values. Vice versa, if you want to create rough surface, then you should increase roughness value. You want to use high roughness values on rocks, walls, dirt, carpets, et cetera. Again, this is just how they work commonly. On a case by case level, you can polish a wall or cut a stone to make it glossy, for example. Notice that when roughness value is high, the surface becomes less reflective. Now, besides dielectrics, you can also use the roughness value for metallic objects. In real world with certain treatments, we can make metals look rough. For example, brushed metal. Another example is when we paint a metallic pane to rough or porous surface, et cetera. On certain electronic devices or furniture, you can spot metal surfaces that are rough so even though they are metal, you cannot see clear reflections on their surfaces. If we want to make a material transparent or through, we can use either the Alpha primeter or the transmission primeter. What makes them different is that transmission is physically correct, while Alpha is not. Essentially, the Alpha value will just make the object disappear without adding any refraction effect. So this is more suitable for visual effect purposes, such as when you need to render a ghost or three holographic projections like the ones you see in Star Wars movies, one is the default value, which makes the material fully opaque while zero is the minimum value that makes the object fully transparent or practically invisible. Besides physical effects, Alpha is often used to create cutouts. For example, we can make a simple plain object to look like a tree leaf using an Alpha texture. We will cover how to do this leader when we discuss textures, all right? If we want to make a material transparent while correctly simulating refraction, then what you should use is the transmission primeter not the Alpha primeter. For example, when you need to create glasses, liquids, diamonds, et cetera, if the value is at zero, which is the default, then the material is basically fully opaque. And if the value is set to one, which is the highest value, then the material is fully refractive. For a clear glass, you want to use white for the base color and set roughness, all the way to zero or of very low value. Please note that the transmission slider tends to **** the volume of the object. That is why personally, if I want to simulate a tinted glass, I prefer to leave the transmission value at one and just play around with the base color. For example, we can set the base color to dark gray to create the black tinted glass of a car window, or you can set it to green to simulate the glass of a green battle and so on. All right, let's bring this all the way to zero again. Now, because transmission is physically correct, other physical priameters will also affect or defund the end result. For example, if you set the metallic value to one, it seems that now the transmission primeter does not work. The object is not transparent at all. Why is that? Well, this is because there is no transparent metallic material in the real old. Blender will nullify the transmission effect if you set the material to metal. So in the real world, if you ever see a transparent material, then you can be sure that it is a dielectric material, not a metal. Another physical parameter that affects transmission is roughness value. If you increase the roughness value, the refraction will be affected and become more and more blurry. You can use roughness setting on glass material to simulate frosted or sand blasted glass materials. Okay? Of all the physical parameters, IOR is perhaps the most important value that works in conjunction with the transmission parameter. IOR stands for index of refraction. Essentially, it is a physical property that affects how much light bends when it enters or exits the object's volume. You can easily search online for the correct IOR values. As you can see, the vacuum is one, air is almost one. Water is roughly at 1.3. Diamond is about 2.4, and common glass is about 1.5, which is the default value used by bender. You can follow these values if you want to be perfectly accurate or physically correct in your rendering. But personally, I only use two IOR values most of the time. I set the IOR to one. If I want to make a balloon or anything that is transparent but filled with only air, and for the rest, I just leave the value to 1.5. The reason for this is that human eyes cannot really tell the difference between IOR values of 1.3, 1.5, and even 2.4. If a material has a reflection effect with IR 1.5, it looks good enough to represent the other common values. 12. Coat and Sheen: In this video, we are going to discuss the code engine primeters first, is the code primeter. Use the code primeter to add an additional layer of transparent coating on top of the existing material. This is very useful to simulate effects such as thin films, car policies, or waxes, wood, veneers, and the like. You can search online to understand in detail how each of these effects works in the real world. Long story short, using the code primeter is like having a thin transmissive slab that sits on top of our base material, which can have its own independent roughness, color, and IOR. The top parameter which is weight controls how strong the effect is, lower values make the code less visible, while higher values make it more prominent or visible. Now, before we continue, there is one important thing that I haven't mentioned yet about vendors sliders, especially the sliders on material parameters. You see, although these sliders cap the values to a certain maximum number, you can actually type in a value that is way higher than that. In this case, although the weight parameter is apt at one if you type in two, you get twice the strength. You can try five or ten, et cetera. At this point, you may be wondering. So what is the point of setting maximum number if we can still have a value higher than that? Well, the default maximum number is here for two reasons. The first reason is to keep the material physically correct, as you can see in the code example with value that is too high will result in a strange looking material that is impossible to exist in the real world. Essentially, if you want the material to be physically correct, then you should stay inside the slider values. As an artist, though, we do not always need to create things in photorealistic style. Sometimes we need to bend reality to create stylized artworks. That is why we have these options in lender if you ever need them. The second reason why the default maximum number exists is because values higher than that will not produce any different results. For example, we can type in ten for the Alpha value, but it will not produce anything different than one because when an object is already fully opaque, it won't get more opic than that. Another example is if you set the metallic value to ten or even 100, you won't see any difference from the value of one because the material will not become more metallic than what it already is. So again, if you want to create a photo realistic result, then you should stick with the numbers provided in sliders. But when you need to create stylised artwork and want to exaggerate certain effects in your material, blender allows you to do that also on some of the parameters. Let's continue with the other code primeters. The roughness and the IR primeters here are basically the same as the roughness and the IOR parameters we discussed on the base material. It's just that these two are applied to the code layer, not the base layer. So these settings sit on top of these settings. In real world, most coating layer implementations are usually applied on top of rough surface or at least rougher than coating layer. So ideally, the base material has a high roughness value, while the coating is glossier or has lower roughness value. The last one is the thin perimeter. If you set this to white, which is the default, there will be no other color on the coating layer. But if you choose a different color, you will get an additional color mixed thin with the base color. The stronger the saturation and or the lower the brightness, the stronger the color tinting effect will get all white. Next is the sin perimeter. If you look closely at fabric materials in real wood, especially velvets, you will notice that its borders or surfaces that are perpendicular to our viewing angle tend to have brighter colors. Why is this happening? Well, this is due to the small fur like particles that exist across the fabric surface. Our eyes can pick up light rays that bounce off of these particles when they are positioned closer to a perpendicular or 90 degree angle. Other particles actually also reflect lights, but they are going in other directions as the particles are more aligned with our eyes line of sight. If you want to create this age brightening effect on your material, then you can use the shin primeter. So to recap, we use the shin primeter to add bright areas on the border or edges of the surface when the faces are perpendicular to our viewing angles. This is very useful for simulating clothes fuzziness or dust, for example, to see the shin effect much better, we may need to use a darker Bish color. Notice that we can use the weight parameter to control how strong the effect is. Just like the code weight we discussed before, we can also crank this value up beyond the fault maximum number by typing in a value manually. But again, if you want a realistic result, you should stick with the values in a slider. All right? Now, for the roughness parameter initen category, the name can be a bit confusing as this is not like the roughness values we used before. Essentially, this value controls how white the shin color spreads from the borders or the edges. Higher values will cover more surfaces. While lower values will shrink the coverage area finally, the tin perimeter. This is basically the color of Lucien effect. In practice, you want to keep the color not far away from the base color. You can keep using white as this is a safe and neutral color. But if you prefer colors other than white, for example, if you have a green base color, you should pick a light green color, for lucen tin color. If you use other colors in your will, such as blue or red, for example, the result will not look realistic, but you may need this to simulate visual effects such as ghosts or holograms. That is, if you use Shen together with the Alpha parameter, 13. Specular and Anisotropy: In this video, we will discuss the specular and asotropy primeters. You can access both primeters by opening the specular group in the material panel. But before we tweak the material, let's create two new objects so we can see the changes much better. First, let's add a cylinder. I think what meter radius is to be, let's try 50 centimeter radius. Move this to the side, change the seating mode to smooth, and let's supply the caterial to the cylinder object. Next, let's add a U V spare object. Move it here. Change the shading mode to smooth, and let's supply the same material also. Okay. First is the specular. In computer graphics, the term specular refers to the bright highlight that we usually see on round glossy surfaces. Please note that in the real world, there is actually no such thing as speculars. What we perceive as speculars are actually reflections of light sources, such as the sun or the land. So most of the time, if you want to achieve photo realistic results, you do not need to touch most of the settings in a specular group except the isotropy. You only need to access the settings when you want to exaggerate the highlights in rendering result. The first option is the algorithm which controls how the speculars are being calculated. DGX is faster, but less accurate, while multi scattered DGX is slower, but more accurate. The difference between the two is very subtle, so you notice it. Next is the IOR level. It is called level because this value is not a real IOR value, but actually a multiplier that will override the original IOR and roughness value we set up here. This value will spread or shrink the region of the highlights. In Lander 4.3, this IOR number is a bit confusing. You see the default value is 0.5. In this value, the original settings we have up here will be used as Is without any overrides. If you set this to zero, all highlights or reflections will be gone. If you set this to one, the effect will be doubled. If you set this to two, the highlights are four times stronger. If you set this to a very high value such as ten, then you may see that all of the surface becomes the highlights, all right? Let me bring this back to one. Now, the tint color below will add additional color to the highlights. You can make it yellow or red, et cetera. Again, I need to warn you that you should leave these two settings to their defaults, if you want to after realistic results. We can set the values back to the defaults by hovering the mouse over the field or slider and then press big space on the keyboard. Next is the anisotropy, simply put. Nasotropy is a stretching effect that happens on highlights in the real world. You can see this phenomenon on reflective surfaces that have long and uniform scratches, such as brush metals. There are two values of anasotropy that we can control. The strength of it and its orientation. But before we tweak these settings, please note that the esotropy effect will be more visible if roughness is not too low or too high. I found that values around 0.2 to 0.3 work best. Okay. Notice, as you increase the ansotropic value, the highlights become more and more stretch, and as we change the asotropic rotation, the stretch highlight rotates. Please note that this value is a scaled version of the degree value. The value of one is equal to 360 degrees. So one and zero are basically the same orientation. 0.75 means 270 degrees, 0.5 means 180 degrees and 0.25 means 90 degrees. Most of the time for long cylindrical models, you need to set this value either to 0.25 or 0.75 to create nice looking isotropic effects, right? One last thing that I need to mention is that the orientation of the anisotropy is not based on a global coordinate, but it is based on the object's local coordinate. That is why if you rotate the object around, the asotropy orientation will not break. It stays with the object. This concept is very important to understand, especially when troubleshooting materials isotropy for example, let's say we downloaded a model and then tried to apply a 90 degree or 0.25 aotropy If the effect does not show, this could be due to the object having the wrong local coordinate or orientation. Ideally, you want the elongated part of the object lined with the local Xaxis coordinate. If this is not the case, you can take the origin point by rotating it or alternatively use zero or 0.5 instead for the anisotropic rotation. 14. Emission and Subsurface: In this video, we will discuss emission and subsurface parameters to save time, we will be using glassine where we already have three objects side by side. To see the emission effect better, let's add a floor using a plane object. Make the size 10 meters by 10 meters. And let's place this slightly touching the bottom parts of the three objects. And lastly, let's supply a new material for the plane object. Make the base color light gray. Okay? First is the emission parameter. Simply put, the emission perimeter will make the material emit light into the scene. This is suitable for creating light bulbs, AED, strips, monitors, screens, et cetera. You can find the perimeter in the emission group. This is for controlling the strength, and this is for controlling the color. Unlike most sliders in material panel, Blender does not keep the strength slider to any default maximum number. So you can drag the slider and keep increasing the value as you want. Now to see the emission effect on neighboring objects, let's apply the emission only on the center object. Let's bring the value back to zero by pressing the backspace key. Then make sure the center cylinder object is selected to duplicate an existing material, we can click on this duplicate icon. Now, although the cylinder still looks similar to the other two objects, it actually uses a new independent material. Let's rename this to glow so we can easily tell which one is which. Now we can try increasing the emission strength of this material as before. You can see how the light affects the surrounding objects. Let's set this to 50 for now. You can try using other colors such as purple blue or yellow. Please note that currently in bender 4.3, only the cycles rendering engine supports emissive material. EV and of course wage rendering engines will not process the emissive lighting. In EV, you can still see the bright colored material, but no lights are produced from the material that affects the scene. All right. Let's switch the rendering engine back to cycles. Next is the subsurface perimeter. The name subsurface is actually a short version of the term subsurface scattering or just referred to as SSS or even a shorter version. Subsurface scattering is a visual phenomenon that we can see on human skin, wax, certain marble, stones, and milk or other dense fluids. Essentially, these materials have surfaces that are slightly transmissive but have a lot of particles inside their volumes. Most of the time, we cannot see the effect, but when these materials are exposed to a strong enough light, the light rays can travel inside the volume, bonds around or scatter inside the volume due to the particles inside it and finally go out of the object. So what makes this effect different from the ordinary transmissive material is the particles inside the volume that randomize or scattered light rays. This is why our skin looks red when placed behind light soles. The red color comes from the particles inside our skin, which are our blood cells. You can mix and match subsurface with other primeters, but to see the effect better, you want to use hyogos values such as 0.8. And also set Alpha and transmission values to their defaults so the object is solid. And finally, make sure that we rotate the camera so that the object is in front of a strong light source. Okay? The first parameter is the method or the algorithm used to calculate the effect. Christensen bully is faster, but less accurate, while random walk is slower, but more accurate. There is also a special version of random walk that is optimized to simulate skin surfaces. For now, let's try this random walk skin method. Now, because subsurface scattering is heavy on the system and tends to generate noises, you may need to increase the noise threshold or the cycles rendering. For now, let's just set the viewport noise threshold to 0.2, all right? Let's go back to the subsurface material settings. Now, you may be thinking that this weight value is for controlling the strength of the effect. Well, it is actually not. This slider is like the metallic slider up here. If you want to achieve realistic results, you either set this to zero for a full diffuse mode or set this to one for a full subsurface scattering mode. Setting the value higher such as ten or 100 will have no effect. The results will be just the same as one. So again, don't think of this value as strength, but rather a blending value between diffuse and subsurface modes. Next, are these two primeters the scale and the radius. We need to discuss them together because they work hand in hand. In short, the radius values control the color. So this is for the red color component. This is the green color component, and this is the blue color component. The scale value will multiply these three values. Let's say we want a full red color for now, so you can see it better against the green color. For this, we can set all components to zero except the red component and for the scale. Noice it is measured in a real world scale unit. Currently, it uses centimeters because that is the unit I used in this scene. We know for sure that the monkey head object is about two meter square in dimension. So if you set these two to meter, almost the entire monkey head model becomes red. If we set this to 100 centimeters, for example, or just 30 centimeters, then let's area or volume of the model becomes red. Let's bring this to 200 centimeters again, right? The IOR value in a subsurface category works the same as the IOR value up here or in transmissive mode. If you set this to one, we can almost see the object as hollow object. We can see the front eyes, even from this angle, just like the IR value in transmissive. Most of the time, it is enough to use a value of 1.5 or default 1.4, as our eyes won't be able to tell the difference. Finally, is the anisotropy primeter. This value controls how spread or how linear light ray scatters inside the volume. Zero scatters the light uniformly in all directions, while higher values scatter the light more strongly forward. Human skins, for example, have been measured to have an isotropy of 0.8. You can use measured values if you want to be very precise or scientifically correct, but just like the IOR, mostly, you can just leave the value to the default as our eyes are hardly able to spot the difference. 15. Project: White-colored nightstand: In this exercise lesson, we are going to add materials to the nightstand to the model that we created in our first course. We will use white paint color for all the wood parts of the model. But for the handle part, we are going to use a metal material. More or less like this preference photo, although I think the handle for this variants is gray, stainless steel. We'll use brass, so at least we have a bit of warm color in our model. All right? Currently, the model consists of many objects. Let's join them all. Press A to select all of them. Make sure we select the main body part less as it has the origin already at the center. Then press Control J to join them or make all of them become part of the main body object. Now, when creating three models, especially furniture, you want to place the origin point precisely at the bottom. This is so that leader, we can position it on the ground or the floor surface easier. For this, we can press Control period to activate the origin editing mode, move the origin down, and hold control to snap it to the bottom verticies. Don't forget to turn off the origin editing mode by pressing Control period again. Now we have the origin point nicely placed at the bottom. Let's rename this object to something more meaningful. I'll name it nightstand. You can use any name you like that makes sense to you. Okay. Let's start with the wood color as it is to dominant material. We can start by picking the color from reference. You may use any method that you like. Personally, I use a Windows app called Power Toys. With this app. I simply hold the shift Windows key and letter C on a keyboard to bring up the color picker window. Then I use the pick feature. What we're trying to pick is the neutral color. This is the highlight color. And this is the shadow color. So I guess the middle color is the neutral one. Then press this icon to copy the color to the clipboard as a hexadecimal code. Yes, the color is not fully white because as you can see, it is a bit darker than this white book cover. All right. Let's go back to blender. Open the materials panel, and create a new material. I'll name this one with painted of white. Feel free to name the material with any other name that you like. Click on B color field and pass the color code. Now, if you look at the preview, the default material is not glossy, so let's change the roughness value to around 0.3. Let's activate under view mode to see how the material looks on the three model. I think the material is already looking nice. You can see the highlights on the curved surface area. Finally, we can add the material for the handle part, create a new slot and then create a new material. Let's name this one metal brass glossy. For the color, we can again rely on reference images. I already search for metal bred color in browser of record. I want to pick this color in the middle. Again, I am using the Power toys color picker for this task. After we have the color code in clipboard, we can go back to blender and paste the color as the materials base color. Because this is supposed to be metal, we need to increase the metallic value all the way to one, and to make it look glossier, we should decrease the roughness value to a very low number, say 0.1. I think this is enough to sign the brat material, we need to go to phase mode out A to this. Then hover the mouse on the handle part and press L. Now that the faces are selected, we can go back to the metal material and click the sign button. And there you go. We just finish adding materials to the nightstand through the model. 16. Project: Window materials: In this exercise video, we are going to add materials to the wall and window objects that we created before during the basic modeling course. Make sure we are in a rendered view mode so we can see the materials directly in the viewport. Let's start with the wall object. Create a new material for the wall. Name this one wal dot Big. Then change the base color to a beige color. Notice that in the preview panel, the material has highlights. Some wall paints do have highlights or are a bit glossy. But for this wall, we want to create rough material, so maximize the roughness value to one. This way, we won't see any highlights or reflections on the wall. All right. The wall material is done. Let's move on to the material of the window frame. Let's say we want to use a black aluminum, also known as aluminum depending on where you live. Make sure the frame object is selected and then create a new material for it. The name the material to metal aluminum black. Set the color to black, but drag the pointer up a bit so it is not fully black. Now, the real color of aluminum is sulfure gray. I am not an expert in metallurgy, but we can tell for sure that if a metal does not possess its real color, it is coated or painted. Aluminum with non gray colors such as black, brown, red, blue, et cetera, is created through a coating process known as anodizing. Because of this, we do not want to use a full one for the metallic value. Let's make this 0.8. And for the roughness value, let's make this 0.3 to make it glossy. After you are done, you can apply the same material to the such objects. Now, if you only have one model, you can simply click on the material drop down list and then choose the material from the list. However, this method only affects the active object, not all selected objects. If you want to affect all selected objects, let me and do this first. You need to select all objects, you want to apply the material to, and then lastly, select the object, you want to copy the material from. After that, press Control L, and then choose link materials. Okay. Next is the glass material. Make sure the object is selected, create a new material for it. We name this to glass window clear. Then increase the transmission value all the way to one to make it fully reflective. Currently, it looks like a frosted glass because of roughness value. For a super glassy glass, we can just set roughness value to zero. You can see in the preview panel that the highlights are now very sharp. Next, we want to add an extra detail to the model, and that is adding a black rubber seal around the border of the glass. For this, we can activate wireframe mode, go to face mode, and then select the center faces, both the front and the back, perform an inset by pressing I and then type one for 1 centimeter. Currently, the center faces are selected. What we want to select now are the border faces. So press Control I to invert the selection. After that, we need to create a new slot. We can assign this slot right away to the selected pass even without any material created yet. Then we can create a new material in the slot named the material Rubber dot Bg For the color, we can set this to almost black. For the roughness value, I think the current 0.5 value is already enough. Let's go back to the rendered view mode. As you can see, now we have a black rubber seal around the glass object. Finally, for the left glass object, because the size is the same as the right one, we can make the left an instance of the right glass. This will copy not only the material, but also the geometry, including the border faces. For this, we need to select glapGlass first, and then select the glass glass, press Control L, and then choose link object data. As you can see, glap one now has rubber border also. So again, with this method, not only the material but also the geometry gets transferred, and Alhamdla materials for our wall and window objects are now done. 17. Shader Editor basics: In this video, we are going to discuss how to work with the shader editor. When composing materials in Lander, besides using the material panel in the properties editor, you can also use Shader nodes, which you can access through a special editor called the Shader Editor. In Lender 4.3, the shader editor has three modes. Object word line style, as the name implies, this one is for creating line style, which will be useful if you want to create two D or sel shading style renderings. This is for controlling the word lighting and or the background color. And this one is the one we need, which is for controlling the object materials. So for now, make sure you set the editor to object mode. This is important because otherwise, you won't see any material nodes in shader editor. All right. Now, if it's like an object in TV viewpoint, the shader editor will automatically display the shedder nodes of its material. If the object has multiple materials, you can switch between them through the material list in a material panel. Essentially, if the material is displayed in a properties editor, the nodes will be displayed in the Sher editor. Alternatively, you can also access the material list by clicking on the slot button on top of the Seder editor. Now, if you look at the nodes, notice so the default material actually has two nodes, the material output node and the principal BSDF node. Most of the time, you'll be using the surface output. You may need to use this volume output leader when you want to simulate volumetric objects such as fire, smoke, fog, clouds, and like, okay? Now inside the principle BSDF node, you can find all the parameters that we have discussed before, such as the base color, metallic slider, roughness, IOR, and so on. If you change a value here or a color, for example, the changes reflect automatically in the material panel. Essentially, they are both referring to the same data block. We will discuss how to compose materials later. For now, let's focus on how to navigate the shader editor. The way we navigate the shader editor is practically the same as we navigate the three viewport. You can press and to show or hide the side panel, you can scroll the mouse to zoom in and out to open the view, you can use the shave and middle mouse drag. But because you cannot rotate the view like the TD viewport, you can use the middle moouse button drag instead to pen the editor. So again, rotate the scroll wheel to zoom in and out and drag the middle mouse button to pen the view. One less shortcut, which I think is important is the home key. Just like in a three D view port, the home key will automatically frame the view so that all the nodes are visible. This is important because sometimes when you open a material in a schedule editor, nothing is visible. This happens because the editor view was zoomed or pinned too far from the nodes. If this ever happens to you, simply press the home key on your keyboard to see all the nodes again. All right. To move a node, you can simply click drag the header area of the node. Please avoid click dragging on the center area because you might accidentally click on parameters that you don't need. If you have a node selected, which is indicated by white border, you can also use the G shortcut to move the node around. If you want to move multiple nodes together, you need to set them first. You can hold Shift and then keep clicking on the nodes you want to set. Or you can also select them by click backing on an empty area to create a selection box. After we have them selected, we can then move them together as if they are a single node. You can duplicate a node by pressing the shortcut, and to delete a node, you can press X or delete on a keyboard. To create a new node, you can use the ad menu on top. Or you can use the shift a show card. As you can see, Blender provides a lot of different nodes that we can use. We will discuss some of these nodes in later lessons. For now, let's create a brightness contrast node. Another way to delete a node is by clicking on a node and then choosing led from all of these explanations, I believe you already see the pattern. Basically, most of the object operations in the TD viewport also work in the Sedar editor. This is great news, as we will need to switch back and forth between the TD Viewport and Shedar Editor quite often. 18. Texture fundamentals: In this video, we are going to start using textures in our materials. Let's start with the definition. So what is a texture? In computer graphics, a texture is basically an image that we use to enrich our materials. Some people and even some todo software like to call textures as maps. So don't get confused when you see the words diffuse map instead of diffuse texture, for example, they basically mean the same thing. Okay? A simple cube object, for example, can look like a brick if we put a brick texture on its material. Or it can look like a stone if you apply a stone texture and so on. In general, there are two types of textures, procedural texture and file image texture or just image texture for short. So what is the difference between the two? Well, procedural textures are images that are produced dynamically through programming. So usually, we can easily control how they look simply by tweaking their parameters. Most of the procedural textures are generated into this space. This means that it can be easily applied to three D objects without the need of UV mapping. We will discuss UV mapping in more detail later. In short, UV mapping is a method to place the images onto the object surfaces. The downside of procedural textures is that they do not look realistic, or at least it is harder to make them look realistic if we compare them against image textures that were taken from photographs of real material. The less downside of procedural textures is that it is almost impossible to transfer them to other software because they are basically a program generated specifically for a certain TD application. We can, however, bake them into image textures if we need to transfer them to other applications, but that will be for lesson or not recurse. The second type of texture is image textures. Unlike procedural texture, image textures are stored as image file formats such as JPEG, PNG, X are HDR, et cetera, most of them are captured from real world materials through photographs or other means. So in most cases, they look more realistic than procedural textures because they are to the images that we need to place onto the objects. We need a way to map them correctly. This mapping method is what we call UV mapping. Again, we cannot use image textures if the three D models do not have proper UV maps. The nice thing about image textures is that they are accepted globally or can be used across different do software. Let's discuss the procedural texture first, and then later discuss image textures and finally UV mapping. To create a procedural texture, in shader editor, you can press Chief A and then open the texture sub menu. As you can see, Blender provides more than a dozen texture nodes. Almost all of these are procedural textures, except, of course, the image texture. Besides image texture, this environment texture and IS texture are also not procedural textures as they need external fit to work. We will discuss them later. For now, let's create a procedural texture node called the brick texture. As the name suggests, this texture node generates brick texture. But as you may notice, having a node inside shaded editor does not automatically affect the material. We need to connect this node to our main material, which is using the principal BSDF shader. In blender, the way nodes work is like this. The left side is the input, and the right side is the output. So the data flows from left to right, okay? In the brick node, these two dots are the outputs, and these dots on the left are the inputs. To use this big node, we need to connect the output that generates the colors to the input.in our main material node. If we drag this color dot and connect it to the base color dot, now the original base color we had before is overridden by the color output from the brick texture. If we check the material panel, so we cannot access the color box like we used to. Instead, it is now replaced by this card button that we can use to expand or hide the brick texture priameters. So again, the parameters you see here now are basically the same primeters you see in a brick node. Let's say we want to change the first color of the brick to red, change the second color variation to a brownish color. As for the mortar, we can try a light gray color. Besides colors, there are plenty of parameters that we can twig. We can control the scale of the texture or control the size or the width of the mortar, and so on. Feel free to experiment with the rest of the primeters if you want. Essentially, as I mentioned before, procedural textures allow us to choose the way they look dynamically, right? Now, nose as I disconnect the dots. The original control for the base color is back. This basic working concept applies to the other dots or primeters. For example, if we connect the color dot to the metallic dot instead, now the original metallic slider is gone replaced by the brick texture. Please note that the metallic slider is one channel value while a color is a three channel value. Remember our lesson on the color model, a color contains red, green, and blue values. The reason why we can plug color data into metalnas data is because bender automatically convert the color into a single channel. Or in other words, a gray scale version of it. In this condition, in areas where there are bright colors or near white, the surface becomes closer to metal, while in areas where the color is dark or near black, the surface becomes more directric, okay? If we connect this to the roughness dot, no the Brick texture controls the roughness of the material. White becomes rough and black becomes glossy or reflective. Another example, if we connect this to the Alpha perimeter, all black colors become transparent while white colors become opaque. From this example, I believe you already started to see the big picture of how a complex material can be composed using textures. Without texture, you can only define a single value for the entire surface of the object. But if we use texture, we can vary the value on different areas of the surface, and we can do this on each of the material parameters. This gives us more detailed controls over how the object should look. In theory, you can convert one output dot to multiple input dots at the same time. But in most cases, you do not want to do this. To achieve the best result, you should provide each primeter with specific textures designed to be used with that primeter. We will cover this in more depth leader when we discuss the BR textures. One last step that I want to mention is that when you need to disconnect a lot of connectors like this, click dragging each of them one by one can be time consuming. In such a case, you can just hold the Control key and then using the right mouse button, perform a drag across these connectors to cut them all at once. 19. Image texture basics: In this video, we will learn the basics of using image textures in Blender. Previously, we discussed procedural textures, which is the first type of texture. The second type of texture is the image texture. As I mentioned before, there are textures stored in image file formats such as PNG, JPEG, and so on. There are multiple ways to bring an image texture into blender. If you are in Shader Editor, you can use the ad menu up here, then choose the texture sub menu and then image texture. Or you can also press Shift A textures, then image texture. For faster workflow, you can make use of the search feature. So after you press Shift A, just type image or just three letters IMA. In Cnion you can use your mouse to select the image texture node. But because the item is already highlighted, you can just press Enter to confirm. All right? If you already have the image opened by Blender before, you can click this icon to open the image drop down list. Here, you can also use the search feature. But if the image has not yet opened before, you can click on this folder icon to browse your computer to find the image. Just for example, I want to use this image. Feel free to use any image that you have on your computer. The image is now loaded into Blender. Nothing has happened yet because we haven't connected the node to the main material. Let's connect the color output to the base color. Now you can see the image in a three D model. At this point, you may be wondering, we are currently using an image texture, even though we haven't applied any UV map to our model. How is that possible? Well, this is possible because all newly created primitive objects such as cubes, spheres, planes, et cetera, all have default UV maps built in. But once you start modeling using these objects, the UV map will start to break. Just to prove this, if we create a cube and then apply the same material we have for the plane object, you can see that the default UV map of the cube object is working fine. But as we start modeling on the object, such as performing extrude or tweaking the vertex position and so on, you will see how the UV map starts to break down. So most of the time, after you create a custom TD model, you need to take care of the UV mapping. That is, if you want to use image texture on that model, all right, we will discuss UV mapping techniques in later lessons. For now, we will stick with basic TD objects and their default UV maps. When applying a texture to an object, it is very common that we don't get the perfect placement out of the box. One way to control texture placement is by using the mapping and texture coordinate nodes. These two nodes work hand in hand, so you always see them together. Let's add the mapping node first. Press Shift A, then type MAPP, then hit Enter. You want to place this next to the image texture. Now on the CV plug the vector output dot into the vector input of image texture. This node actually breaks the UV map if we don't use it together with the texture coordinate node. So let's add the node. But now I want to show you yet another method to add a new node. This method is quick, but you need to know in advance where you want to connect the node, I know that we will be using the texture coordinate node by connecting it from the UV output to the vector input. So I click reg the vector.in the mapping node and then just release it on an empty area. If you do this, Blender will automatically open the node search panel. We can type in CR and then choose texture coordinate UV UV is the output dot that we want to use, and there you go. Now you can see the image texture on the object again. I know that this can be a bit confusing at first, but trust me, things will get easier from now on. Also, I need to remind you again that these two nodes are optional. You only need them if you want to control the texture placement from meeting the shader editor. Most of the time, you don't need these nodes. Without them, Blender uses the objects active UV map by default, which is what most people need. If we have the setup, we can tweak the texture placement using these parameters in the mapping node. The location X value is for moving the texture left or right relative to the image. The Y value is for moving the texture up or down. Now, Z value is only useful to control three procedural texture. This has no effect if we use the image texture. Contrast with the texture rotation for to the images, you only want to rotate the texture using the image Zaxs. Rotating the texture using the X or Y axis may result in a distorted texture. Finally, you can scale the texture using these values. Again, because we are using to the image, only the scale X and Y values matter. You can only see the effect of the scale Z value if you are using procedural texture. But to quickly change all of the values, you can click Reg like this to select them all and then type in a new value. Please note that if you have the point mode active, the scale value actually works in reverse. It is like defining the amount of tiling. The value of two means that there will be two tiles horizontally and vertically. 0.5 means that there will be half of the image tile, and so on. Essentially, lower values mean larger image texture, while higher values mean a smaller texture. If you prefer the other way around, you can change the type to texture. In mode, smaller scale values mean smaller texture sizes, while bigger values mean bigger texture sizes. Okay. Besides tweaking the texture placement, you may also need these two nodes set up for more advanced scenarios. We won't be discussing these techniques in this course, but just for an insight, if you are using the particular system to instantiate objects such as grass or pebbles, et cetera, you can make them extract the UV mapping from the emitter object using this option. Another example is the camera mode. This mode uses the active view or camera as the texture projection, which can be useful for compositing or merging printings into the scene. We have the object mode where we can use the local coordinate of the object or another object as the reference. This can be very useful for architectural models. The generated mode uses the bonding box of the object to project the texture and so on. We will discuss them in later videos. Essentially, Blender provides many different ways to map image textures into our scenes or objects, and UV map is just one of them. All of these can be accessed through the texture coordinate node. 20. Installing Node and UV add-ons: Before moving on with lessons, there are two add ons that you need to install as you are going to use them later. First is the no wranglar add on, and second, is the magic UV add on. These add ons are official add ons, so you don't need to search outside the blender app. Simply open the preferences window. I already have the install. So when I go to the add on step and search for node, you can see the add on not wranglar. And if I search for magic UV, here is the magic UV add on. If you haven't installed them, you can go to the Get extension step. Search Not wrangler search field with for it, as this could take a while depending on the Internet connection. After you see the No wrangle addon with an active Install button, just click on Install button. It is the same process for the magic UV add on. Search for the name and then press the Install button when it is ready. From this point forward, I will assume you already installed both add ons, okay? Let's discuss the Nod wranglar add on first. Essentially, this addon gives you a lot more methods and shortcuts when working with nodes in Blender. If you click on Show Hot Kells button, you can see dozens of shortcuts added to blender. Please note that the schedule editor is not the only editor that works with nodes. The compositor and geometry nodes also work with nodes. And so the Nod wranglar add on benefits you also if you often need to work with these editors. You can throw each of these shortcuts, or you can also check the online documentation if you want to learn more about the add on features. Besides shortcuts, if you open the shader editor and then press N to open the side panel, you can see a new tab called Node Wrangler. You can access some of its features here. If you prefer to use Pop up menus, you may also access the tools by pressing the Shift W shortcut. All right. The top two features of the node wrangler addon that I used all the time are the texture setup and the ad principle setup. The two lone can save you hours of time, especially when you need to work with large scenes with a lot of different textures. We will cover the principal setup leader when discussing PBR textures. For now, we can check what the texture setup does. Essentially, this will add all the necessary nodes to compose an image texture. Currently, it is not active as we don't have any material nodes selected. If we select this principled BSDF node, for example, and then click on this button. You'll get the image texture node, the mapping node, and the texture coordinate node already connected and ready to use. You only need to select the image file using this open button. We have discussed this in a previous lesson. But suddenly, I really use the side panel or the pop up menu boxes this feature. What I prefer to use is the shortcut Control as it is way faster to perform. Again, this shortcut is rangular add on feature. So pressing Control T will do nothing if you don't have the wrangular add on installed. The next add on is the magic UV add on. You can already tell by the name that this add on is focusing on UV mapping features. We will discuss some of its features when we later discuss UV mapping. But just to clarify what has changed when you install the add on. The first is in a TD viewport. If you select a mesh object and then go to the edit mode, you can see a menu called the UV. The original vendors menu for UV is from the top until this reset command. Below it, all of these commands are from the magic UV add on. Besides the menu, if you press to bring up the side panel and open the Edit tab, here, you can also see a lot of the magic UV features, which you can turn on or off depending on your needs. But that is not all. If you open the UV editor, you can see even more tools both in the UV menu and also on the side panel area. Again, we won't be discussing all the magic UV features as there is too much to cover, but we will discuss some of the most important ones. Hopefully, with this, you'll be able to try and experiment with the rest of the features yourself. 21. Assigning PBR textures: Starting with this lesson, we will discuss PBR textures in depth. As for this video, we will learn the basics of assigning PBR textures using the node wrangler addon and using the import USD material feature. We will also cover several techniques for organizing the nodes in shader editor. There are many websites that provide textures for three usage. Some of these websites provide textures for free, such as blenderk.com, boyhaven.com, vincg.com, and so on. Some websites provide paid textures with several free ones. For example, polygon.com, textures.com, gametexts.com, fab.com, and so on. If you download a texture from these websites, you will get not just one file, but multiple files. This is because currently, they all follow the PBR standard or physically based rendering principle. For practice purposes, I already downloaded this Stonewall texture set from ambientcg.com called Tiles 093. To use this texture set in lender, you can do it manually by importing each of the textures one by one, but it will be a lot faster if you use the not wrangular add on for this, as it can import a whole texture set in one go. First, make sure the main material node is selected, and then you can click on this button that says at principal setup or simply use the shortcut Shift Control T. I suggest that you memorize the shortcut, as you will need to do this often when working with blender and BBR textures. Notice that this command opens up the file browser. In this condition, you need to select not just one image, but multiple images at once belonging to the same texture set. If you activate the list view, you can see the type of texture at the end of their names. For example, color, displacement, normal, et cetera. We will discuss these texture types in a later lesson. For now, just hold Control and then select the color file, the normal GL file, and finally the roughness file, and then click on this button to confirm the input. As you can see, all of the texture files have been assigned automatically to our main material node. The add on also created the mapping and texture coordinate nodes for us and already shared it across the texture nodes. So they all use the same UV map. Let's check the rendering result. We can try rotating the viewport to see the material against the light source. It seems everything is okay. Now, you might ask, how does the No wrangular addon know exactly which files go into which slots? Does it use AI? Unfortunately, no, I just recognizes certain keywords that are present in file names. If you open the preferences window, and open the node wrangular options, you'll see button that says Edit tags for auto texture detection. If you click on it, you'll see the list of keywords or tags used by the add on. For example, if the add on detects diffuse, df Albedo, and so on, the texture will be used as color texture of writing the materials based color or write. Before we discuss what just happened in shader editor, let's go back and see the other files that we don't use. For this, you can use the file browser editor upon the folder where the texture set is. All right. This image serves only as a preview. This way, we can see what the material looks like when browsing the files before we input them into blender or other TD apps. Basically, this file is not a texture. Next, are the normal map files. We will discuss normal map in greater detail in a lady lesson. Long story short, they are used to define the bumpiness of the material. As you can see, ambiencg.com provides two types of normal map files. The DX version is for direct X, and the GL version is for OpenGL. Most of the time, you only need to use the OpenGL version. If you find a normal map without the DX or GL letters behind its names, you can be sure that it is an open GL version. The DX version is only useful in game engines when you want to target PC or Windows based machines that use direct X API. Okay. Finally, these two files. These are also not a texture. This one is a material definition in the material X format, and this one is a same definition in the USD format. You can search online what material X is and what the USD file format is. Ner supports importing and exporting USD file formats. Although I prefer then wrangular method, let's see how we can import textures in the form of USD material. First, go to the file menu, then import, and then choose Universal scene description or USD. Select the file. Now this is important. Before you click on Import USD button, you need to open the material section on the right panel and then turn on this import all materials option. If you don't have this enabled, bender will ignore materials that are not linked to any geometry, and because the USD file we are about to import does not contain any geometry. It will ignore the material unless we have this turned on. Okay? Now we can click the Import USD button. Material and the needed textures are already imported, but no object is using it yet. To check the material, you can select any object, and then upon the material drop down list, and here is the material. The reason why I prefer to use then wrangle radon over this import method is that the results can vary depending on the person composing the material. For example, it uses a specific UVMp name that does not exist on the object. We need to remove the name first for the material to use the default UVMp instead. Also, we don't actually need to use this separate color node, as the texture is in gray scale and already has the color space option set to non color. If you are still confused, don't worry. We will discuss this nonclor value and separate color node in later lessons. All right. Let's go back to our previous material with nodes created by the node wrangler add on. Besides using the material panel in the properties editor, you can also quickly swap materials via the drop down list at the top of the shader editor. Now, looking at these shader nodes, there are a few things that might spark your curiosity. First of all, there is this connection junction. Is little dot that makes the connection branch is called a re root. If you are wondering how to create this, there are several ways to do it. But first, you need to understand that this re root node is not mandatory. I mean, you can just branch directly from the output point like this, the re root node is useful to keep things organized, especially if you need to connect to nodes that are far apart or are blocked by other nodes. The first method, which is my favorite method is to hold the Shift key and then click drag using the right mouse button across a connector. As you can see, Bender creates a new reroute node at the location where the cut happened. The other two methods are using the ad menu up here or using the Shift A shortcut Joe layout menu and then use re root. Place the node in any location that you like. After that, you can connect to or from this reroot node to other nodes. Okay. Please note that you cannot move reroot node simply by clicking and dragging like you normally do with other nodes. Why? Because click dragging will create connectors instead. To move this node, you need to select it first and then press G Okay, to delete a reroot node, you can just select it and then press the delete button. However, if the node has two in and out branches and you do not want to break the connection, you should press Control X instead, right? Let me set the reroot node back as before. The last thing that I want to mention in this video is these black boxes. These are called frames. The main function of these frames is just for layout purposes. So you don't actually alter the nodes or the rendering result in any way with frames, you can easily move all the nodes inside it together as if they are a single node. To put a node inside a frame, for example, is reroot node. Simply move and release the node where it is inside that frame area. If done correctly, the frame now will automatically try to wrap the node. To create a new frame, my preferred method is to use the shortcut Control J. But first, you need to select the nodes that you want to include. Just, for example, we can select these two nodes, press Control J. Now, we are both inside a new frame to delete a frame, simply select the frame and then press delete. Deleting of frame will not delete the nodes inside it. The alternative method of creating frames is through the shift a shortcut or the d menu up here. Can go to the layout sub menu and then choose frame. Just place the new frame in any location that you like. If the frame is empty, we can change its size by dragging its border, but this one automatically put the nodes in the area as its member. You need to select the node or several nodes and then release them inside the area to make them members of the frame. As you can see, this method takes too many steps compared to the Control G shortcut. The last technique I want to cover is adding label to a frame to do this. Make sure the frame is selected. Then inside panel in the node tab. Just type the text you want to appear in label field. You will see the label text at the top of the frame. 22. Basic PBR textures: In this video, we are going to discuss the three basic textures in PBR standard. They are color, roughness, and metalness. As the name suggests, we put the color texture in a base color slot. We put roughness texture in roughness slot, and we put the metalness texture in a metallic slot. Easy, right? Especially if we are using the no wrangular add on, all textures will automatically go to the slots where they are supposed to go. The thing is, when you download older three D files or older texture sets, you may not be able to find roughness or the metalness textures. Instead, what you can find are the specular and glossiness textures. The color textures are also sometimes called diffuse and other times are called a video. This condition can lead to a lot of confusion for beginners, but no worries. Hopefully, after this video, you will understand why they are different naming conventions, and also you will know how to deal with them confidently in Shallow. At the beginning of the PBR adoption, there were two different approaches for composing PBR textures, the metallic workflow, and the specular workflow. The metallic workflow uses a combination of albedo, roughness, and metallic textures to define the material, while the specular workflow uses diffuse, glossiness, and specular textures to define the material. Both workflows have pros and cons. Years ago, people like to debate which one was better. But as time goes by, more and more artists and studios prefer the metallic workflow and abandon the specular workflow. Nowadays, most of the time, you'll get this set of textures when you download or process textures, although you may still encounter this set of textures from time to time, especially if you are downloading 33d models that are quite old. So what is the difference between the two? Long story short, the metallic approach puts all the color information in the albedo texture. This makes roughness and metallic textures are always one channel or in gray scale color. Where the metallic texture is white, then that area of the surface is metal and where the metallic texture is black, then that area of the surface is the electric when the material is metal, the reflection color is taken from the color in your video texture. So it is that simple. On the other hand, the specular workflow divides the colors into two. One is in the diffuse texture to define the surface base color, and the other one is in the specular texture to define the reflection color. But you will only see colors in the specular texture if the material is metal. For the electric materials, the specular textures will only have sky colors, right? The reason why people eventually prefer the metallic workflow is because it is less demanding on memory and computer performance. The metallic workflow only needs five channels in total. That is three channels or RGB channels for the color, which we call it albedo, one channel for roughness and one channel for metalness, while the specular workflow needs seven channels in total. There is three channels or RGB channels for the color, which we call it diffuse, one channel for glossiness, and another three channels or RGB channels for the specular. Another issue is also the amount of image processing for the color texture to be used in a specular workflow. For the PBR standards, color textures usually still contained shadows, highlights, and reflection colors. Most of the time. We want to avoid these colors as they can make the material look fake. With special processing, the shadow and highlight colors can be removed from the image, leaving only the pure color of the surface. The result is what we call the albido texture. This is the type of color texture needed in a metallic workflow. However, this is not enough for the specular workflow, as we still need to take out the reflection colors and move that color to the specular texture. The result of this process is what we call the diffuse texture. So again, the diffuse texture is basically a color texture where the shadow highlights and reflection color are taken out from it. Now, don't be surprised if you find 99% of read materials have no difference in terms of their diffuse and do textures. Why? Because only metals have reflection color, and even in a metal family, you will only find two colored reflections, yellowish, such as gold and brass and reddish, such as copper and bronze. And that's it. Other metals like aluminum, platinum, chromium, sulfur, and so on, they all have no noticeable colors in the reflection. Essentially, you will only see the difference between diffuse and do textures when you mix the electric materials with colored metals such as gold or copper on a single texture set. Of course, this will be a different story in non realistic scenarios. For example, if you create a sci fi or fantasy world in video games or movies, when you are bound to create realistic rendering, you are free to create any type of colored metal that does not exist in the real world. Okay? So now you understand why there are so many different names for these textures. The way we deal with these textures is as follows. For color textures and their variants such as di fuse and do, you just need to plug them into the Base color slot. All right. Please note that for color textures, you want to make sure that the color space option is set to as RGB, as RGB stands for standard red green blue. This is the default option, so you don't need to do anything about it most of the time. Essentially, if you set this as the standard RGB, lender will process the data that goes out the node as three channels, each eight bits wide or 24 bits in total. The next texture type is roughness. Again, to use these textures, we just need to plug them into the roughness slot. White colors mean fully rough and black colors mean fully glossy. Now, one thing that you need to be aware of when using this texture is the color space option. You need to set this to non color. This tells bender to process it as a single channel data and not a three channel data. Personally, I hate that we need to set this manually because sometimes you forget to set this correctly and end up messing up the rendering result. I hope in future versions, the image texture node can detect and output the data automatically, but at least we do not wrangle add on, this kind of mistake can be avoided or at least minimized. Now, sometimes you cannot find roughness texture and can only find the glossiness or glossy texture. As I explained before, these are textures from the specular workflow. What is unique about these textures is that they are the opposite of roughness textures, meaning that white is fully glossy, while black is fully rough. So if you want to use this type of texture, then you need to revert the effect using a special node called invert color. We don't have a glossiness texture currently, but let's assume that this roughness is a glossiness texture. To create an invert color node, just press Shift A and then type invert, and here is the node. With this node, we need to intercept the color output data from the image texture and then plug the inverted result into the roughness slot. Again, this is what you need to do if the image is a glossiness texture, right? The next texture type is the metals or metallic because we are using stonewall texture that does not contain any metals. There is no metallic texture in a texture set. This is another reason why people prefer the metallic workflow. It is if the material is not a metal, then there is no need to create a metal texture. This saves yet one more channel from being processed by the computer. For now, just imagine that this roughness texture is a metallic texture. If so, you need to make sure that the node is set to non color, and then you have to plug this into the metallic slot. Again, white colors in the texture would be considered fully metal, and black colors mean fully dielectric. Okay? Now, if you find that the texture set still uses the specular wow flow, meaning that instead of metallic, it uses specular texture, you can still use it in lender. You can plug the texture into the tint color slot in specular group parameters. What makes the specular workflow a bit tricky to work with is that if the material is metal, the specular texture will contain RGB color. So in such a case, you need to set the color space to a RGB and not known color, all right? 23. Displacement texture: Next, we will discuss textures related to surface height. Essentially, these are textures that can create bumpinous effects on object surfaces in rendering result. We can divide this type of texture into two categories, displacement and normal. Nowadays, the normal map usage is more common than displacement, but let's discuss the displacement first, and then after that, the normal map as displacement is older and has fewer channels. Unlike the normal map that has RGB channels, the displacement texture is a single channel texture. Meaning that it can be represented as a grayscale image a long time ago when computer graphics were quite young. We could only use this kind of texture to fix the shading. We can make the surfaces look bumpy at facing angles. But when we move the camera to a more perpendicular angle, we can start to see the surface is actually flat. That is why back then it was called a bomb map as it is only capable of generating fake bomb effects on a model. Nowadays, we can use these textures to actually generate polygons that appear in rendering results. This process is what we call displacement. Since the technology exists, people have started naming these textures displacement or height map. Now, because eight bit progenel images are limited to only 256 levels, a lot of people prefer to use high dynamic range images to store more height information in the texture. High dynamic range images are basically images that can store more than eight bits per channel, such as HDR and HR. Special variants of PNG and TV can also contain more than eight bits per channel. So again, usually bump texture has only the standard eight bits per channel, while displacement and high texture usually has more than eight bits per channel, and so commonly they are larger in file size. But there is nothing preventing people from naming eight bit images as displacement or naming higher bid images as bump. Essentially, we handle these textures the same way inside vendor, as they are all single channel images. For our practice, I have downloaded this free texture set from polyhaven.com called Large square pattern 01. I pick this one because it has both normal and displacement maps in one texture set. That's assign this texture set to our plane object in vendor using the no wrangularidon. First, let me just delete all of these nodes from the previous lesson. Then while you have the principal node selected, press Shift Control T to import the textures, select all of them, and then press this button to confirm the import. If we look at the result, we can see that the displacement texture is unique instead of being connected to the principal BSDF node, it connects to the main material output. Why is that? Well, this is because the displacement texture needs more access to alter the geometry and not just to control how the surface looks. Also notice that it uses non color data for the color space, and it has to go through a special processing node called displacement. Inside this node, we can see a scale value that we can use to control the strength of the displacement effect. For now, let's unplug the normal map so we can just focus on previewing the displacement effect. All right. The default scale value is one. If we set this to zero, the bumpiness effect is completely gone. If we set this very high like ten, the effect will look unrealistically strong. Let's just use one for now. This mid level value controls the overall height level of the surface, but you can only see the effect in displacement mode, so let's leave it for now. Before we do anything, I think currently the lighting is distributed evenly to see the bump effect better. Let's open the viewpoint rendering options and drag this down to around 0.2. Next, I know we haven't discussed lighting yet, but let's add a simple point light really quickly by pressing Shi A, then type point and Enter, increase the power to about 1,000 watt and move this up a bit a finally, I think we should hide the floor grid and also this axis. Okay. Now, if we move the point light around, you can see subtle shadows on the surface reacting to the light, mimicking the bumpiness of the original material in the real world. But if we rotate the view to see the surface from the side, we quickly realize that the surface is just a flat surface. Essentially, by default, Blender only performs the bump effect and does not use real geometry or so called displacement. The reason for this is that displacement effects require more memory and processing power. They are only suitable for creating large noticeable objects such as terrain or very close up objects. Again, this is why normal maps are more commonly used than the displacement maps. To activate the displacement effect, there are two things that you need to do. First, the model needs to have enough polygons to accommodate the effect. Second, you need to switch the bump mode to displacement mode manually in material settings. Let's tackle these requirements one by one. First, we need to add faces to the plane object. For this, we can go to the solid view mode, then activate the edit mode, select the pace, white click, and then choose subdivide. Let's make this all the way to ten. Let's divide again once by pressing Shift R to repeat the command. Let's go back to the rendering mode. The next requirement is the material settings. You can find this in the settings category. Remember, not the displacement but the settings category. At least, it is how it is in Leonard version 4.3. In a surface subcategory, you can find a displacement option. Notice that currently it is set to bump only. This is the reason why we only see bump effects on the surface. To activate displacement, you can either activate the displacement only mode or better use both displacement and bump for a more pronounced effect. In this condition, if we rotate the viewport round, we can see that this is not just a shading effect. Real geometry is being used here to define the bumpiness effect. Now we can try tweaking the mid level value. As you can see, we can control the overall height of the surface using this value. 24. Normal Map: Let us continue our discussion on the height information textures. Previously, we discussed displacement texture. We will now cover the normal map. For practice, we will be using the file from the previous lesson. For now, let's unplug the displacement texture so we can focus only on the normal map. All right. As mentioned in the previous video, unlike the displacement map, the normal map is a three channel image, so it makes use of red, green, and blue channels. At this point, you may be wondering, why do we even need three channels just to define the height? Isn't one channel enough? Well, the problem with one channel data like bum textures is that they can only define flat surfaces. To give you a better understanding, let's look at this diagram. Imagine we have. So for pixels, we want to give height information too. We can set a height value of 100 for pixel number one, then 120 for pixel number two, then 150 for pixel number three and so on. Notice how the surface created by these pixels is jagged or stepped. It cannot create smooth diagonal slopes. Yes, we can provide more pixels like thousands or even millions of pixels so that when they are combined, the surface looks like smooth slopes. It is like looking at a minecraft world that has blocky mountains and valleys, but from a distance, this can be done for terrain or large objects. However, using high resolution images for every bomb effect is not a good idea, as they can consume a lot of VMs quite quickly. In general, this is not always the best approach. To solve this issue, instead of just using one channel, we can add two more channels to define the detail of the surface. This is the basic idea of a normal map. So how does this actually work? Well, the first element of the normal map, which I think is the most important one is the third channel or the blue channel. Basically, this channel works like the classic bump or height map. This means that bright colors produce high elevation surfaces, and dark colors produce low elevation surfaces. In other words, how the surface is placed in a Zapis direction until this point, the normal map is exactly like the bump map, okay? What makes thermal map unique is the red and green channels. The red channel is used to define the surface tilting against the X axis direction. High values mean that the surface is tilting towards the positive X axis, while low values mean it is tilting more towards the negative X axis. As for the green channel, this channel works exactly like the red one, but in the Y axis direction, so higher values mean facing towards the positive Y axis, and lower values mean facing towards the negative Y axis. So in short, a pixel can have height information controlled by the blue channel and also tilting information controlled by the red and green channels. This is why normal maps can deliver more believable bomb effects compared to classic one channel bomb maps. With normal maps, a surface or an object can look way more sophisticated than its original geometry, right? In blender, if you want to use a normal map, we need to use image texture node. Please note that although normal map uses three channels, red, green, and blue, the way it use color channels is not like the color texture. So you should use the non color option in a color space parameter. Next, you need to plug the color output into a special node called normal map, and finally, send the normal output to the normal input slot in the principled BSDF node. Again, if you have not wranglear add on, all of this setup is done for you automatically. Okay? Now, if you already have something like this, you can control the bumpiness strength using this strength slider. One is the default value. Zero means that the bumpiness effect is off. If you set the strength quite high like ten or 100, you can get even stronger bump effects. You can also put a negative value. Notice that negative values reverse the bump effect. Now, the tile blocks are going down while the gaps are going up. I think we can see the effect better if we unplug the color texture and also roughness texture. Again, you can see how the effect is reversed due to negative strength value. Okay. So that is basically how you can use normal map. Let's set this back to one for now. There are at least three limitations that you should know regarding the normal map. The first is that normal map can only produce fake bump effects, meaning that it cannot alter the geometry as the displacement effect does. If we see the object from the site, we will just see a flat surface. The next limitation, which I think is the biggest downside is that you cannot rotate normal maps via the mapping node. Why is that this is because normal maps are specifically built for certain X, Y, and Z orientations. So rotating it away from its original orientation will break the effect. Just to prove this, let's rotate the texture 180 degrees. As you can see, now the bomb effect is reverse. The tiles are going down while the gaps are going up, it is like having a negative strength value. Please note that this is not a problem specific to blender, as all the software have this problem also. But still, I really hope that in the future, blender developers find ways to automatically fix normal maps when the mapping node is rotated. For now, the work around to this issue is to avoid rotating the texture via the mapping node and use the UV editor instead. I know we haven't discussed UV mapping, but just to give you an insight into how it works. If you rotate the vices in VVter and then check the rendering result again, as you can see, the shading autobum effect is perfectly fine. Although we have the texture rotated, alternatively, if you really need to use the rotation slider, such as for creating an emission, then you can always use the displacement map instead of normal map. Okay? One less important thing that I need to mention before I end this video is that you should not use normal map together with displacement map. Why you see the most common method to create normal maps is through process called baking. Essentially, we first create a high resolution version of the model and then project the surface information into a low resolution model. In other words, normal maps are built for specific to the models, and because most available textures on the Internet are general textures that are built for flat surfaces, when we displace the surface and then apply a normal map to it, the result can be unexpected. So again, although technically, you can use both together, it is better to choose just one whether you use the displacement map or the normal map. 25. Alpha textures: In this video, we will discuss Alpha textures, also commonly known as opacity textures. You may already guess the function of these textures just by the names. Essentially, they are one channel images that we use to control the opacity or the transparency of materials. White color means fully opaque while black color means fully transparent. The most common use of the alpha texture is for foliage, especially tree leaves. There are two common methods of how people use or store alpha textures. The first is as an independent file apart from the color texture. And the second method is by combining it inside the color texture file. So in the first method, you will have two files, one for the color texture consisting of three channels, red, green, and blue, and another file for the Alpha texture in Glascale color. While in the second method, you'll have one file consisting of four channels in total, three channels for the color information, and one channel for the Alpha. Please note that not all image file formats support the Alpha channel. JPP format, for example, does not support the Alpha channel. Therefore, you can only use the Vs method if you prefer the JP file format. On the other hand, PNG, EXR, TV, and TGA, all support Alpha channel. So if you are using these file formats, you are free to choose either the first method or the second method. All right. For practice, I'll be using the file from the previous lesson. But to see the transparency effect better on the viewpoard, let's first open the viewport rendering panel and then bring the strength value back to one. Also, set the opacity value all the way to one. Currently, the geometry of the plane object that we have here is too dense. So let's just hide it for now. Let's create a new plane object which is still a single phase. Finally, let's create a new material for it. Okay, if you open mbmcg.com and search for if, you can find this texture set called Leaf 001. As you can see, it provides JPEG versions in one K to Fk resolution and also pin the versions in one K to Fk resolution. Let's download the one K PNG texture set so that later we can compare the two methods. Okay? After you download the texture set, you can see that this texture set contains an Alpha texture with the word opacity behind its name. At the same time, the color texture also has a transparent background. This indicates that Dimag actually contains Alpha information inside it. To use the texture set quickly and easily, as always, we can rely on a node wrangle add on, select the principal vis DF node, then press Shift Control T. For now, we want to see the first method, select the color texture, normal GL, opacity, and roughness and then click this button to confirm and here is the result. As you can see, with just a single phase or four Vertoss in total, we can simulate a complex silhouette veraging the Apha texture. Imagine if you have to model this leaf manually, it will take dozens of ertoss just to get the leaf shape right. From this example also, you can learn that to use an Alpha texture, you need to set image texture node to non color and then block the color output into the Alpha input slot. All right? The second method of using the Alpha texture is by making use of the Alpha channel stored in color texture. Again, I need to remind you that this is only possible if the color texture does contain an Alpha channel. If, for example, you have a JPEG file for the color texture, then this method is not applicable. Okay? Let's first unplug the Alpha texture. You can see the material now becomes fully opaque. Now notice that besides the color output, the image texture also has an Alpha output. This is what we need to use to connect to the Alpha input slot in a Princip pod DF node. As you can see, we get the same transparent effect as before. Okay, guys, so that is basically how we can use Alpha textures in blender. 26. Emission texture: In this video, we will discuss the emissive or emission texture. Basically, it is a texture that controls which area of the surface emits light and which area does not, pure black will turn off the emission effect, while other colors will generate light based on their brightness. What is so great about the emission effect is that you can also use RGB or colored images. If you use a colored image, then the color of light will follow the color in the image. The most common usage of emissive texture is for simulating display devices such as smartphones, TVs, computer monitors, neon signage, and so on. Besides that, you can also find people using emissive textures for simulating windows on buildings at night or spaceships, for example, or Sci Fi panels that have a lot of running, ED lights, et cetera. Essentially, when you need to control the lights that are coming out of the material, then you have to use emissive texture, all right. One downside of using emission texture is that it will only work if you use cycles. You want see effect if you are using IV, at least not in version I am currently using, which is 4.3. Who knows perhaps in the future, IV will also support it. For practice, I have already prepared a file that you can download and use right away. This is just a basic scene where I put two plane objects vertically and added two boxes at the sides and another plane for the floor. I am sure you can create something like this, so I just created them off record. To use demissive texture, you just need to plug the texture into the missive color of slot and then control the strength value as needed. Now, if you only want to simulate display devices, you don't actually need a separate texture. You can just plug the existing color texture into the initial color slot. Just, for example, imagine that this spin object is monitored or a neon signage. Currently, it already has a color texture. What we want now is to make it shine and brighten up its surroundings. Now, if you just increase the strength value in emissive category, the light will just be one color which is currently set to white. This can work for single color light bulbs or the filter objects, for example, but this does not give a realistic result for screens or monitors. So to fix this, simply create another connection from the color output of the color texture to the emission color input, and there you have it. Again, you need to remember to increase the strength value to see the effect. If you have this value at zero, the emissive effect will be completely off. All right. Another approach to using the missive texture is to use an independent texture separated from the color texture. For this example, I have downloaded this texture set from threerepbar.com called the Si fi panel one. I am sure by now, you already know how to set up a texture set like this. The challenge is that now we want to add AID lights running through some of the duck channels shown in a texture. So what I did is I created this texture in Photoshop using the original texture as the reference. As you can see, I use a bright blue color because there is the color of light that I want to produce, and for graphs, I set them all to pure black. This is important because no matter how high the emission strength value is, if the color is black, it will nullify the emissive effect. Okay, so let's add this in and see what it looks like in rendering. Let's move these two nodes to the right so we have more room. Press Shift A, n type image, and create a new image texture node. Click on the open button, select the missive texture I provided, and then make sure that the color space is set to SRGB, as we do want to send the color out and then blog this into the mission color slot. Let me move these notes again so we can see clearly where the connection is going. Don't forget to increase the strength value as high as you need it to be. Notice how the blue lines that I drew in Frisia start glowing. The higher the strength value, the stronger the light coming out of the material. Notice also that the areas where there are pure black colors do not change no matter how high, we increase the strength value. So that is how you can use emissive textures inside bender. 27. AO and ARM/ORM textures: In this video, we will discuss the AO or ambient occlusion texture, and after that, the arm or arm textures. First, is the AO or ambient occlusion. In computer graphics, the term ambient occlusion is used to describe small subtle shadows that appear on corners, gaps, and crevices. You usually see these shadows in anoraqes skylight and hardly see them in bright sunlight. This is where the word ambient originated. The term ambient or ambient lighting is a condition where lights are coming from all directions in a uniform strength, while the term occlusion means areas that are occluded or blocked from lighting. This is due to the surface that forms holes, gaps, and kernels. So how can we use this o texture then well, the answer is you don't use them. That is, if you're using cycles to render your image. Why? There are three reasons for this. First, if you use cycles for rendering, all shadows will be calculated automatically, whether they are from direct lighting or indirect lighting. Adding static Ao textures to your rendering will make it look fake as they will appear even under bright light conditions. The second reason is that cycles does not support AO texture. There is no input slot available for the indian occlusion texture for a good reason. Remember our discussion on our video and the fuse textures. People tried so hard to take away the shadows from the color texture. So why in the world do we want to put them back in? Third reason is that if you do want to achieve faster rendering time by sacrificing realism, Cycles already provides its own AO system called fast GI approximation. Okay? So again, if you are using lender and cycles for rendering, just ignore the AO textures. Most people who are using AO textures are using them for game development. Game engines such as real engine support the use of ambient oclusion textures. The way these game engines work with AO texture is that they display the texture only when the surface is not hit by direct lighting. They only show up when the lighting conditions is in shadow or overcast or in indirect lighting condition. In other words, it knows exactly when to use them and when to turn them off to make the rendering results look believable. Personally, I use Unreal engine a lot to make architectural to the animation. But because our course is not about unreal engine, we will just leave it at that. The last one is the arm textures, sometimes referred to as M textures. In recent years, there have been more and more people using a strange new texture type that looks like the normal map texture, but they are not. If you see this type of texture, don't be confused. Basically, there are three textures combined into a single image. This method is known as channel packing, and the textures are called channel pack textures. As in the case of arm or RM textures, the first texture is the ABN occlusion texture stored in the first channel or red channel. The second is the roughness texture stored in a green channel. And the third is the metallic texture stored in a blue channel. So unlike the color texture, this texture is not intended to be viewed as es. Please note that this type of texture is mostly used in game development to make packing the game data easier or less complicated to maintain. We rarely see these textures for non game usage, but in case you receive a texture set that uses this approach, you can still use it in vendor by first separating the channels. For practice, unfortunately, I couldn't find any m texture that is copyright free that I can share in the course. So I created this texture myself from a texture set provided by cgbooks.com. All right? For this workflow, you cannot use Not wrangler as it does not support Channel pack textures like this, at least not in version I am currently using. Hopefully Not wrangler will support it in the future. For now, we have to assign the texture manually. Now, because the arm texture does not contain any do and normal map information, we still need to use these textures in different image texture nodes, and for this, we can still use Donald Wangler addon. So let's start with these two textures first. We want to use the floor pan object for this, so make sure it is selected. Then select the principal BSDF node, then press Shift Control T. Select only the color and the normal textures. You can try selecting the m texture also, but it will get ignored. Click this button to confirm. All right. We now have the color and a normal map assigned. Next, to use the m texture, you can create a new image texture node, or we can also duplicate this color texture node by pressing **** D. Let's organize these nodes so we can see their connections better. Now, click on a folder icon to load the texture. Make sure it is set to as RGB as we want all three channels to get outputted. Now, this is the important part. To split the RGB channels into individual channels, we need to use a special node called the separate color. So press Shift A and type in separate. Then use the separate color node. Plug this in. Now we can use each of the red, green, and channel separately. The first one is the Ambien occlusion data. Remember, we don't need this texture if we are rendering with cycles, so we can ignore it. The second channel or the green channel is for roughness value. So we need to plug this into the roughness input slot. Lastly, the blue channel is for the metalness value. So we plug this into the metallic slider. And there you have it. After you understand how to use this separate color node, you should be able to handle different types of channel packed extures. For example, if someone decided to create an image file containing roughness of emission, you can easily use that image in your material. All you need to know is the order of the textures. The first texture should be at the red channel. The second is at the green channel, and the third is at the blue channel. 28. Project: Vase procedural texturing: In this exercise video, we are going to add a material and a texture to a vase model that we created before in a three D modeling course. For now, let's activate the material preview mode so we can see the texture, but not to heavy on system. Make sure the vase subject is selected, and let's create a new material. I'll name it vase, but you can name it any name you want. For this material, we are not going to use an image texture, but rather a procedural texture to replace the base color. In this case, what I want to use is a procedural texture called Gabor. So just press Shift A. Then in a texture sub menu, use Gabor texture. If we plug the value output into our min material based color input slot, you can see the texture in a VportGabr texture is commonly used for simulating wavy surfaces such as dissu sand or ocean water, et cetera, by default. The texture is in two D mode. What we want to use now is the three D version of it. So change this to three D. The scale value defines the size of the texture. I think I want to set this to seven for now. You can always adjust the leader if you want. Next is the frequency. As you can see the higher the value, the denser the texture is. Let's set this to five Notice that currently the pattern is almost vertical, which is not suitable for our waste model. We want the pattern to be a bit tilted to tweak ddation, you can click and react this sphere. But I find that this method is a bit too hard to control. I prefer to use numerical values that we can get from the mapping and actual coordinate nodes. So let's set this back to the default by hovering the mouse on top of it and then pressing the big space key on the keyboard. All right. Now to create the nodes that we need, we can just select the main material node and then press Control Again, we can do this because of the node wrangular addon. We don't need the image texture node, and we only need the object orientation as we are working with three procedural texture. I prefer to use the texture type for the mapping, and let's plug this into the vector input slot of the gibber texture node. Now that we have the rotation parameter, we can try rotating the texture in axis coordinate to find the angle that we like. I think I'll just use 90 degrees for now. Next, we want the pattern to be more dense, Let's try tweaking the scale value. I believe 0.5 is enough for our needs. Okay. Up to this point, you may be wondering. What if we want to use other colors, then just black and white. There aren't any parameters to control the colors. Well, to map the color to any color that we like, we can use a special node called color AMP. We can just type AMP to search for the node, and here is the node. If we put a node on an existing connector, vendor will automatically place the node in between with all the connectors already plugged in. But let me move these nodes. So you guys can see the connectors better. And let's side the side panel by pressing and so we have more space. Okay. So basically, the color ramp node maps the darkest until the brightest input colors with any color that you like. For example, we can change the darkest color to purple color. So black is no purple and replace the white color with an orange color. The reason why the node is called ramp is because it works like a gradient. If you drag the first node to the right, the purple color becomes more dominant. Vice versa, if we drag the white node to the left, the orange color becomes more dominant. For now, let's make the purple color slightly more dominant. All right. Lastly, we want to use the Gabber texture to also control the normal map of the material. For this, we need a node called bump. Connect the value output to the height input slot. And then output the normal to the normal input slot. Currently, the bomb effect is too strong. We need to turn it down quite a bit. For this, we can pay around with the strength value. I think 0.2 is enough for our case. This is the result so far. Let me tweak the purple color again so it is slightly more prominent. We can try switching to the rendered view mode for more realistic lighting. I believe we already have a nice looking material. Remember that we are using a procedural texture, so we can always change the settings if we want to, for example, changing the scale value or other values, et cetera. 29. Project: Snowman procedural texturing: In this exercise video, we are going to add materials to the snowman model we created before in basic TD modeling course. Just as the previous lesson, we will only be using procedural textures for this project. Let's activate the rendered view mode. You may also use the material preview mode if you feel your computer is getting too slow. Select the two head objects and then create a new material, name it head or other names you like. For the color, let's set this to purple, but a dark one more towards black. Let me drag this up a bit. We want to simulate a rough fabric, so drag this roughness value all the way to one. Next, to add a velvet effect on the border area, we can use the shin parameters. Perhaps increase the weight value to I think 0.3 is fine for now. For the sin color or thin, we do not want to use white as it looks too bright against the dark purple color. We can use a color that is closer to the base color. So we can hover the mouse over the base color and then press Control C to copy the color, then hover on the shin color or thin and press Control V to paste the color. But make the color much brighter. I guess this is enough. Lastly, to make the bottom head object follow the material of the active object, we can press Control L, and then choose link materials, and the head material is done. Next, we want to add the material for the is. Create a new material and name it e. Imagine that the eyes are basically just pebbles or stones. So let's just use a gray color similar to stone, but a bit towards blue. I think the blue is too much. Feel free to tweak the color until you like how it looks. After that, for the roughness value, we can try 0.6. Sorry, I changed my mind. Let's make this 0.4, so it is glossier. This way, we can see speculars on the eyes. Okay? So this is what we have so far. Let's move on to the snow material. Select all spare objects that make up the body and the head. Create a new material. Name this one snow. I don't think we need to change the color, but for the roughness, we can just set this all the way to one. What makes this snow material unique is that we want to add a bumpiness effect throughout its surface, but don't forget tooling the material first. So all three objects use the same snow material, right. Now we can open the shadow editor. For the bump effect, we want to use a procedural texture noise. Shift A, and just type in noise. Remember that we will use this texture, not for the color, but rather for the displacement. For this to work properly, we need a special node called displacement because now the stexture node works as a height map. We need to connect the factor of slot to the height slot and then the displacement to the displacement slot. Now we can start to see the bum effects on a three model. It is still not perfect yet. First let's tweak the scale value It should be a nice starting point. And to reduce the strength, we can turn down the scale value also, but the one which exists in a displacement node, is one of the reasons why we use the displacement node, so we can easily control the strength of it. I think 0.1 is enough, or sorry, let's make it 0.05 for now. I believe this raw material already looks nicer. But let's reduce the detail value to one. This way, we only have large clums and less of the smaller ones. And let's bring this back to 0.1. Okay, finally, we have nice looking snow. Next, let's create the material for the nose. We can name this one nose. Imagine that the nose is actually a carrot. So for the roughness value, I think 0.4 is enough. And to simulate the carrot color, we want to use a procedural texture called wave. Connect the color output to the base color input dot. Notice how ientation is still not correct. Now, what makes D texture unique is that it already provides a parameter to control orientation based on the objects local coordinate. So we do not need any additional nodes. Simply change this to Y, for example, let's try Z, Z is the correct one. Then we can try tweaking the scale value I think toe is enough. Next, we want to reduce the black color at the tip of the nose. To move the texture position, we can drag the face upset down here. Just drag it until you like how it looks. Personally, I want to have a bit of black on the base of the nose. I think this is enough, okay? To add colors to the current wave pattern, just like in the last lesson, we can use the color ramp node. Replace the black color with a dark orange or brown color. As for the white color, we can start by picking less dark color and make it brighter, so it looks more like a carrot. Lastly, we want the bright orange color to be more dominant compared to the dark one. All right. The rest material that we need to create is the wooden arms, select all the objects, but make sure one of them is the active object, create a new material and then name this material arm or hand. The arms are basically made of dry wooden sticks. So roughness value is quite high. Around 0.9 should be good. As for the base color, we can pick a dark wood color, but more towards gray. And don't forget to press Control L and link the materials so all the objects use the same material. Okay? For this material, I don't want to overwrite the base color. I want to use a texture only for controlling the normal map. For the texture itself, we will be using the wave texture just like the nose. But before we plug this into the normal map, let's first plug this into the base color so we can review it better. For the orientation, I want to use DY axis, and for the wave profile, I prefer to use triangle. You may not see the difference right away, as currently, the pattern is quite small. Next, we can change the scale value let's make this two for now. The key parameter here is the distortion value. Notice, side wack this value up, the more chaotic the pattern is. And so the more it looks like a three bark orward grout. Let's just set this to 15. You can see how nice the pattern looks now. You can keep tweaking the settings if you like. But I will go with this one for now. As I mentioned earlier, we are going to use this not for the base color, but rather for the normal map. We discussed how to generate a normal map before. Basically, you need a bump node and then wag the factor to height and the normal to normal. Currently, the bomb effect is way too strong. We can try turning the strength value down. I think 0.5 should be good. Al halla or snowman model now has all the materials that it needs. Yes, I think we can still tweak the settings here and there to make the materials look better, but I believe you should be able to do that by yourself by now. 30. Texture mapping basics: Starting with this video, we will cover different techniques of texture mapping. Image textures are always two dimensional. They only have X and Y coordinates. This is different from three D models which have X, Y, and Z coordinates. Now, if we have a three D model, say this typod object and we have a texture, say this big texture, we can imagine that this tree model is a gift that we want to wrap using this paper with a brick texture. There are so many scenarios that we can use to wrap the gift with this paper. We can wrap the gift like this or like this or like this and so on. There are almost endless possibilities of how we can go about these methods of placing the images onto three D models are what we call UV mapping or actual mapping or just mapping for short. Now, besides image textures, several procedural textures are also two dimensional, so they also need texture mapping for correctly. If we create a mapping for a certain TD object, that information is stored within the object itself using a special data block called the UV map channel in blender. You can check the UV channels in the data tab inside the UV Maps category. By default, it is named UV Map. You can have more than one UV channel, and you can rename them also with any name you like. We will work with this UV Mb channel in the upcoming videos. Because there can be so many scenarios, Bender also provides many different techniques for texture mapping. It may be confusing to some beginners as these techniques can be accessed in different parts of Blender to make sense of all of these techniques, I group them into three different categories. They are dynamic projection, UV projection, and finally, UV and grab. We are going to dive into each of these categories one by one in the following videos. But just to give you a quick insight, out of these three categories, the dynamic projection is unique because it does not require a UV map channel to work, as the name implies, the mapping is generated dynamically based on the objects local coordinate. So you can just plug a material into any object without any hassle. The downside though is technique only works inside vendor or the software that generates it. If you try to export the TD model to other software, the texture will break. The other downside is that it only works for simple projection types such as flat, box, sphere, et cetera. It is useless for complex models with complex structures. The second category is the UV projection method. Basically, it is a projection method like before, but the result of the projection is bit or stored inside a UV channel of the model. So you can export the model to a new software without any problem. The last one is the UVM rep method. This is the most advanced method that can be used on complex models with complex textures. This method also stores the mapping information inside the UV channel of the model. Unlike the previous two categories, this method requires us to define the seams. In short, the seams are edges that we mark or take to tell Blender where to cut the model. If you are still confused, don't worry, we'll get to that in later lessons in holo to prepare for the upcoming lessons, let's create an image texture. For this, we are not going to use Photoshop or Krita, but we will create the image inside bender. So yes, bender can do that. First, open the image editor or just open rendering tab. As you can see, this window is actually the image editor. To create a new image, simply open the image menu, and then choose new. Let's name our new image as my texture or any names that you like. Lift the width and height to 1024 pixels, and also leave the color black as we are going to generate the texture, turn off the Alpha option as we don't need it. Now, this is the important part in the generated dropdown list, choose color grade and then click the new image button. And here is your image. If you want to save this image to an external file, you can do so by opening theimage menu again. Then use saves. You can specify the file format here. And the file name here or you can also have the image saved within the blend file when you save it. But in order to do this, you need to click this shield icon to create a fake user for it. Remember, flag materials. Images will also get perched when we close and reopen vender. That is, if the image is not being used by any materials in the scene, by turning on the fake user ruption, Blender will keep the image and prevent it from being perched. All right. Next, we can select the default cube object, create a material for it. And then while the principal BSDF node is selected, press Control T to add nodes for image texture. As a reminder, this shortcut only works if you have not wrangular add on active. Okay. Now, to load the image we just created, you don't need to click the open button, simply click on this dropdown list and then select my texture, which is the name we give to the image before. Now, if you activate the material preview mode or the rendered mode, you can see the new texture on the surface of the cube object. You need to save this file, as we will be using it again in future lessons. 31. Dynamic projection mapping: In this video, we will discuss dynamic projection mapping. Previously, we discussed that there are three categories of texture mapping, and the dynamic projection mapping is the first category. This category is unique because it does not use or does not require any UV map channel. In other words, you can just plug your material into any object and it will work. In this category, we can find three methods that we can use. First is the object method. Second, is the generated method, and third, is the camera method. All of these methods can be activated via the schedule editor. It is in the texture coordinate node. So this is the object method. This is the generated method, and this is the camera method. Besides this node, you will also need the mapping node and the image texture node. All of these are very easy to set up if you already have the node wrangular add on. Let's discuss each of the methods one by one. The first is the object method. If you are doing architectural projects, this may be the only method that you will need or use to use this method. First, you need to plug the object output into the vector input of the mapping node. Then you may want to change the projection type in the image texture node. By default, it is set to flat. That is the reason why the image is projected in one direction from positive Z to the negative Z direction. If you look at the bottom surface, you can see how all of the texts are reversed. This is very different compared to the upper part. Again, this is because the image is projected from the top. Before we continue, I think we need to increase the roughness of the material so that we can see the texture better and also turn off the scene vt ation so that the background is not too distracting. Or you can also just use the material view mode, which uses V rendering engine. We can see the texture better in this mode, okay? Let's continue with our discussion. Now, if you change the projection type to box, the texture is projected from six different directions, top, bottom, right, left, front and back. That is why if you look at the cube from any direction, all the tags look normal, none of them are flipped. Besides box, there is also this eruption. This is like wrapping the cube with paper and then tying up the upper and bottom parts. That is why you can see polar stretching at the top area as well as the bottom area. Usually, you do not want to use this unless the texture you have is intentionally designed to have a polar coordinate. The last one is the tube projection mode, which wraps the texture around just like a tube. You also only want to do this if you have a special texture that is prepared specifically to have the correct width to height ratio. All right. Let me change this to box. The next thing that you may want to change is the mapping type. Please note that this is not mandatory. Personally, I prefer to use the texture mode and not the point mode. Why? Well, we discussed this before, but just to refresh our memory, you see the point mode actually works in reverse. I mean, large scale values mean smaller textual sizes, while small scale values mean larger textual sizes. To me, this is a bit confusing or less convenient. If you use the texture mode, the scale values you see down here can be aligned with the metric size of the texture, provided that the object is not scaled. This gives another reason why you should always apply this scale after tweaking the dimension values. So if the object has to default scale values of one and you set this to texture, then these scale values are actually equal to a middle. So the value of one means that the projected texture will be exactly 1 meter by 1 meter in size. What we are talking about here is a single tile of the texture, not the whole surface of the object. I think you can see this better if you turn off the tiling to do that, you can change the repeat option to clip. So again, the single texture size is 1 meter. If we change the scale values to 0.5, then this texture tile size is 50 centimeter square. Now, if you change the scale values to two, the texture gets cut off. Why is that? The default cube size is two meter square, but why does a middle sized texture not fit? Well, if you turn on the tiling again, we can see that this is not about fitting the size, but more about the position. By default, the origin point of the object is used as the reference point for the texture placement. If you press control period and move the origin point around, the texture coordinate will be affected if you hold control and step the origin point to a corner vertex. Now we can see the full size of one texture tile. From this example, we can conclude that the projection is not based on a global coordinate, but instead it is based on the objects own or local coordinate. If you rotate the origin, the texture will be rotated as well. For correct results, you should always align the original orientation with the objects surface orientation. Otherwise, you will get visible squash or stretch lectures. This is something to remember when you are doing a project, especially if part of the buildings are tilted. For example, this is one of my projects, a house design for my client in California USA. If you have a building like this and you want to use dynamic projection mapping for the material, you do not want to have one object for the whole wall. You want to split the wall in this line. The left part and right part walls should have different origins, each aligned with the direction of the wall, right? Now, in some cases, you may want to use the origin point of another object as the reference. Perhaps you want to easily animate the texture or control multiple tilted objects to follow certain object, et cetera. For this, simply select the object from the list or use the Picker icon to pick the object directly in a treat viewport. Currently, we don't have any other objects, so let's create one, say UV spear object. Let's go back to the cube object. Now, we can use the pick icon and click on a sphere object. I condition. If, for example, we rotate the sphere object, the texture will also rotate. If you want to disconnect the object, simply click on this X button. Okay, guys. So that is how you can use the object projection method. The next method is the generated method. Essentially, this is like the object method because it is projected based on local coordinate and also makes use of the projection type in image texture node. What makes it different is that the texture size is not fixed. The size is always relative to the boning box of the object. So you almost always get stretched or squash texture unless you use a perfect cube model to show you what I mean if I extrude this part it looks like the texture is fine, but once we go back to the object mode, the bonding box of the object gets updated, and so does the texture size. As you can see, the texture looks so stretch. We can compare this with the object method, which has a fixed texture size ratio, right? The last one is the camera projection method. Although it is named camera, this mode also works on the active viewport even without the camera. Essentially, it uses the view as the coordinate for the image texture. Usually, you want to use the fret projection for this mode, and let's make the texture bigger to see the effect better. Now notice side deck the viewport round. Or if I dig the object around, the texture just stays in place as it is now not based on the object, but rather on the view. You may need this projection type for certain visual effects, for example, for making dimensional portal or the like, because I mostly work with architectural projects. I rarely need to use this camera projection method. 32. UV projection: In this video, we are going to discuss the second category of texture mapping techniques, and that is UV projection. As we discussed before, the methods in this category work like the previous projection category. But instead of generating the map dynamically, it makes the result into a UV map channel. Because of this, we can export the TD model along with the UV map to other TD software such as scheme engines. In this category, Bender provides five different methods. They are project from view, project from view bonds, projection cylinder projection, lastly sphere projection. For practice, we will use the file from the previous lesson. But let's delete these two objects and create a new cube object. The forget to apply the same material as before that already has the grid texture as the B color. We will be using UV maps. So change this back to UV White click on scale value, then choose reset all two default values and just make sure we have flat and repeat options active. Okay? Use these methods, you need to go to the phase mode, then select the phases that you want to be affected by the UV operation. If you only select one or two phases, then vendor will only process these phases and leave rest untouched. For now, we want to work on all of the phases. So press E to select them all. After that, open the UV menu. Remember that this UV menu do not appear if you are in the object mode. From this menu, you can access all of the methods. These two are the project from view methods. Then in the unwrapped sub menu, you can find the Q projection, the cylinder projection, and sphere projection. Let's discuss the project from view methods first, as the name implies. These methods we project the texture based on our viewing angle. So they are like the camera projection method we discussed before in a dynamic category because they use the active view. Normally, you want to use these two methods in excess view modes, such as the top view, the front view or the side view, et cetera. Really, do you want to do this in a perspective view mode. But just to demonstrate the difference between this command and a que projection, we will just be using the perspective view. Click to use the command. It seems that nothing has happened, but we actually just created a UV map on the active UV channel. To prove this, if you activate the UV editor or simply open the UV Editing workspace, you can see that the UV mapping result looks exactly like how we viewed the T model in the viewport before. Notice that this workspace also has a TD viewport editor. Let's press Z and choose the material preview mode so we can clearly see the texture here. This way, we don't need to go back and forth to the layout workspace, all right. Now, before we try the second command or the project from view bounds, you need to know that performing UV operation on the same channel will allrte existing UV map. So this mapping result will be gone if you perform another UV operation. If we want to compare the results, we need to create another UV channel. As we discussed before, we can create a new UV map channel by going to the properties editor data tab and then opening the UV maps category. Notice that in vender by default, all newly created objects will have one UV map channel called UV Map. Let's create the second one by pressing this Blus button. To make them more organized, we can doublick on first channel and change the name to UV map A then double click on the second one, rename it to UV Map B. All right? We can switch between the two channels from this list, or you can also switch between them from the UV editor, but we need to drag and expand the window first. Okay? So this is the first channel, and this is the second channel. Currently, they both look identical because when we create a new channel, it will copy the UV map in less channel, while the second channel is active and you have all the faces selected. Open the UV menu and then choose project from view bounds. Notice the result. What makes the two operation different is that the leader will automatically scale the UV map, so it makes use of the texture space optimally. So this is the first method, project from view, and this is the project from V Bs method. Now, at this point, you may be wondering, why does the texture dpd in a viewport not change, even though we switch the UV map back and forth? Well, that is because what is being used in a viewport or rendering is defined by this camera icon. The one that has the icon active is the one being used in a viewport. Personally, when I select a channel to activate it, I also activate the camera icon so that what I see in the UV editor is aligned with what I see in a TV viewport. Next, let's discuss the projection method. Essentially, this is like the box projection method in the dynamic category we discussed before. What makes this method great is that we can define the size. Please note that this value is not in thousand, but it is 0.000. And also, this is not in centimeters, but in meters. Currently, this field does not care about what you said in line primeter syne property. It only cares about the original unit system. I'm not sure if this is a bug or not, but I hope in the future, this gets fixed. So it is more aligned with this in length setting for now, because it is in meters. If we set the value to one, the texture size will be in 1 meter square. If we set this to 0.5, the texture size will be 50 centimeter square. I am sure you get the idea. And just like the previous dynamic projection, this size can only be accurate if the TD model has a default scale value of one. No rest, the UV map change because of the size we said, the texture of tile size is no much smaller compared to the three D model. Yes, we can directly scale the model in the UV iter, but we will cover that leader in a different lesson, right? Now let's discuss the sphere and the cylinder projections. Essentially, this is the sphere projection in a dynamic category. While this one is like the tube projection. Now, if you try to use one of these methods, you may get unexpected results. Why is this happening? Well, this is because by default, the direction value is based on a current view. This value defines the axis or the pole direction. To get the correct result, you need to be in the front view or the side view. That is, if you want the pole to align with the z coordinate, as you can see, now the edges in the UV map are straight. Another way to fix the tilting issue is by changing the direction option to line to object. With this option, Benno will not use the view port as the pole reference, but instead uses the local Xaxis direction. 33. Automatic UV Unwrapping: In this video and the next, we will discuss category of factual mapping, and that is UVN wrapping. Previously, I explained that for this category to work properly, it needs the seams to be defined first. What I haven't explained in detail is that there are methods in this category, you can generate the sims automatically. Because of this, I divide the methods into two subcategories, manual and automatic. Manual means that you still need to define the sims by hand. If not, then these methods will just generate an error message. In this manual subcategory, there are three methods that you can use angle based, conform and minimum stretch. So these are manual methods. In contrast, the automatic methods can generate the sims on a fly. So these methods will work regardless of whether the model has the SIMs defined or not. Due to this, some might argue that these are not U Van wrapping methods, but are projection methods. Personally, I still think they are part of unwrapping methods and not projection methods because the algorithms are based on the angles formed by the faces, not projection from certain directions in space. But anyway, the categorization is not that important. It is more important to know and understand how to use the methods. In this subcategory, we have the Smart UV project and light Map pack methods. Let's discuss your aromatic methods first, and then after that, the manual methods. For practice, let's create something more complex than a cube. We can select the phase at the top, then press E, then 2 miles, then press Enter, press Shift R to repeat the extrude. Next, select this phase and then Shift R. Select the phase at this side, then shift R again. Basically, we just created a simple T shape through the model. So clearly existing UV map, you can just read the channel and then recreate it again. Okay. Next, we will also need a more organic like model for this. Let's create a monkey head model. Move this to the side so we can see it. And let's supply the same grid texture material. Finally, we can lead the UV map channel and recreate it again so we have a fresh start, right? The first method in your aromatic subcategory is the Smart UV project. Essentially, this method will split the pass based on the angle threshold. Pieces that form an angle larger than the threshold value will be split, while pass that form an angle smaller than the threshold value will be joined together as a UV island. Now, you might be wondering what is a UV island? Basically, it is an independent structure of mesh elements inside a UV map. If that is still confusing, don't worry. I will show you in a moment. For now, let's site the T shaped model so it doesn't get in the way. Then select the monkey head model, select all the faces, then open the UV menu and then use the Command Smart UV project. Here, you can define the angle limit. For now, let's just leave the value to the default and here is the result. These groups of elements are what we call UV islands. I think we can see them better if we close the image. We can do that by pressing the X button on top. Don't worry. We can always load the image again either. Now, if you revise the angle, for example, we can make it smaller like ten. The UV islands are now smaller than before, that's making their number increase. If you set the angle to 90 degrees, which is the maximum value allowed in this case, we can see larger sizes of UV islands but fewer in number. So this is how the smart UV project works. The next method is the light map pack method. As the name implies, this method is suitable for creating light maps. So what is light map? Simply put, it is a special texture for storing light information. Light maps are generally used in video games and animations to improve performance or rendering time. Essentially, instead of using real light objects and having the computer perform redressing calculations per frame, the lighting information is baked into textures. This way, although the scene looks similar to before, the computer does not need to perform lighting calculations per frame again. The downside of this method is that it cannot be used for moving objects, so this is mostly useful for static environments or backgrounds where the lights do not change over time. Another downside is that, unlike regular textures that can be repeated or tiled, light maps cannot be overlap. Each of the faces needs to have a unique area in the UV map. That is why most of the time, lightmap needs a special UV map channel, so it does not disrupt the main texture UVMp channel. We are not going to discuss how to make light maps in the course, but we can try using the UV method just to see what the result looks as you can see, this method creates non overlapping phases and also makes use of the texture space very optimally. Again, usually you want to do this in a special UV map channel, and then after that, use the UV map as the basis to make lighting information into an image. All right? Because the overall video duration becomes too long, we will discuss the manual subcategory in the next video. 34. Manual UV Unwrapping: In this video, we will continue our discussion on UVN wrapping methods. Previously, we covered your automatic methods. Now, we will cover the manual methods. As I mentioned earlier, there are three manual UVN wrapping methods. They are angle based, conformal, and minimum stretch. What I haven't explained is that these three methods actually come from the same command, so we can easily switch between the three using less action tunnel. Let's see how they all compare to each other. Remember that these are manual methods, meaning that you need to define the SIMS first before you can use them without any proper SIMs. If you select all of the phases right away and then try to run any of these commands, then will only display an error message. Now, if your model is not watertight, in other words, it has holes and borders. You can perform manual UVwrap on it. Just to prove this, if I select these phases and then split them performing unwrap on this model will not result in an error. It is why you can unwrap the monkey head model because of the holes in the ice area. But in most cases, you do not want to break your model, just so you can unwrap it. This is what the SIEMs are for. It is a virtual way of splitting the model without actually splitting them up. The model will only split inside the UV Map editor, not in a three viewport. To the final SIM, simply go to the age mode, strike the edge that you want to take. Right click and then choose Mark SIM. Remember, it is not Mark shop or other edge tagging commands, but Mark SM. If you do this correctly, you should see the edge turn into red. I think we should switch to sod viewport now so we can see the sims better. If somehow it does not turn red, you may need to check the viewport setting by clicking on this button, and then make sure this button is active. Otherwise, all the sims will be hidden in a viewport, okay? Until this point, you may still feel confused or not sure about where to put the seams. Well, you can imagine workflow of how stuffed dolls are created. When a doll maker needs to design a new stuffed doll, she has to create a sewing pattern for a doll. Basically, she has to imagine how the tree form of the doll will look like by creating the two layout of its surface. Well, as a TD artist, when defining the sims for UV and wrapping, we need to think like a doll maker, but in reverse. We need to imagine what the two D layout will look like from an existing T model. Now, you may be wondering, why not just make all of the edges as the SIMs? Will that work? Technically, yes, but that will make further UV editing almost impossible or creating custom textures from the UV map becomes a nightmare. The challenge of defining the SIMs is to balance the output between UVLen size and UV stretching. What I mean by that is we need to think about how we can get UV island sizes as large as possible, but at the same time, with the most minimal stretching, right? For practice, let's take all the edges in a corner of the front area as sims. Make sure we are in edge mode. You can use the shift key technique to select multiple edges. But in this scenario, using the control key is more suitable. Essentially, if you select an edge, hold control and select another edge. The edges between the two edges will get selected automatically. Note that bender does this using a shortest path finding algorithm. So if you want to select the edges around this path, you do not want to just select this edge, hold control, and select this edge. This will only get you three edges selected. Instead, try to select the nearest edge when the path is turning or when there is a junction to better guide the algorithm. After we have all these edges selected, we can click and choose Mark SM. Now, I know we haven't finished yet, but at least with these SIMs, if we try to perform any of the UVN rep methods, it won't display any error. As you can see, the T shaped UV island here is created due to the area formed by the SeaMs while the other faces become heavily distorted or stretch. This is because endo just has a hard time flattening them up due to existing corners. Besides the menu, you can switch or revise the method via the action panel. This is the val based method. This is the conformal method. And this is the minimum stretch method. As you can see, the minimum stretch method is not that good at handling rigid or geometrical forms. All right. Let's add some more seams to the model. But now I want to show you yet another faster method to take edges as SIMs. You see, holding control and selecting edges actually perform a special command called B shortest path by default. It will just perform each selection. But if you change this option to take SIMs, when you perform selection again using the Control key, then we'll take the edges as seems right away. This can save us time as we don't need to access the right click menu. But if you are not using the Control key and only using the Shift key, then you still need to take the edges manually. Now, let's unwrap the model again. This is the result we have. Right now, all the UV islands look like they are connected. We can see the separation better if you have margin value, say, 0.1. Sometimes having gaps like this can be helpful if you plan to paint the texture by hand because they can prevent the brush strokes from spilling over to other neighboring UV islands. All right. Lastly, let's try UV and wrapping the monkey head model. Go to the edge mode besides using Shift or control. If the edges for an he loop, we can use the alky method to select them. Take these edges as SIMs. Then select this He loop. You can hold Shift and together to select multiple edge loops. We can select this He loop at the ear and do the same with the other ear. Now we can Right click and take them all as SIMs. Don't forget also to take these edges on the right and left side, so the SIMs are connected Finally, we can select this edge at the top, hold control, and select these center edges. Until it is connected, we do see line at the chin, all right? After that, we can try unwrapping the model. This is the angle based method, as you can see, although not perfectly straight, at least, it gets the front face almost symmetrical. This is the conformal method. Notice how the phase gets heavily distorted towards one side or becomes not symmetrical. And this is the minimum stretch method, which now looks better compared to how it bends and distorts the previous T shaped model. In conclusion, the depth of method, which is called the angle Bs is the best as it is more accurate. That is, if you have a more rigid model, especially if the model is symmetrical, the minimum stretch method is more suitable for organic shaped models, especially if they are not symmetrical. And for the conformable method, this method is almost similar to the angle based method, but less accurate. If you have a symmetrical model, most likely, the algorithm will fail to make it symmetrical. Personally, I prefer to use the angle based method all the time unless when the result looks to stretch, then I try the minimum stretch method. If I still don't get the result that I want, I usually just add more seams to the model or edit the UV map afterward. We will discuss how to edit UV maps in an extrasen video. 35. UV editing basics: In this lesson video, we will cover the basics of UV editing from navigation, selection, and finally transformation. We will be using the file from the last lesson. For now, we can go to Object mode, hide the monkey head model, and then hide the T shape model, go to the face mode and select all of the pass so we can see the elements in the UV Editor. All right. First, let's cover how to navigate the UV editor. I believe this topic should be quite easy as the way we navigate the UV editor is practically the same as how we navigate the other editors. You can use the middlemost button to pen the viewport and we can rotate the scroll wheel to zoom in and out. If you pen or zoom out too much, you may get lost. In this condition, you can automatically zoom back to see all the UV islands by pressing the home key on the keyboard, right? Next, let's discuss the selection techniques. You select the editing mode or mesh objects. You can switch between mesh element types using these buttons on top. This is the vertex mode. In this mode, you can select vertices. This is the edge mode where you can select edges. This is the phase mode where you can select phases. And finally, this is the island mode where you can select UVolans and you like selecting the mesh object. You also need to be aware of the active selection mode. If you want to select using rectangular region, then make sure you set this to select box. Okay? Now, sometimes you want to cross check the location of an element between the UV editor and a TV viewport. For this, you can activate the sync selection button if this is on. Whenever you select an element in the UV Editor, the corresponding element in a three viewport gets selected also. This works both ways. So if you select an element in a three viewport, the element in the UVditor will be selected also. Please note that this sync feature will disable the island selection mode. As you can see, you cannot find the button to select UV islands anymore. At this point, you may be wondering, what if we want to use the instruction feature, but still need to select violence weekly? Well, you can still do that using the key on your keyboard. To use this method in vividitor, you can hover your mouse cursor on an island and then press L on the keyboard. So remember, you do not need to press any mouse button for this method. You can see that the UV island beneath the mouse cursor gets selected. Please note that this method uses the ad behavior by default. This means that if you keep doing it, more islands will be selected. If you want to de an island, what you need to use is the Shift L shortcut. So again, L to strike an island and Shift to disected. And you do all of these without pressing any of the mouse buttons. All right? What is so great about these two shortcuts is that they also work in a three viewpoint. So you can press L to strike an island or to be precise elements inside the area enclosed by the seams, and you can press Shift L to select the elements. Another approach for selecting violence is to select one of the elements first, and then press Control L on the keyboard. This method also works in a DD viewport. For example, you can select this phase, then press Control L to select other phases inside the same border. To dsletO or slack, you can use the standard endro shortcuts that is using the letter Ak press A once to select, then press twice or double tap the letter Ak to diselO. If you hit double tapping, you can also press out A to disel all elements, right? After we have an element or multiple elements selected, we can perform transformations such as move, rotate, and scale to those elements. The way we transform elements inside the UV editor is also similar to how we transform elements inside the TD viewpoard. We can use either the tools on the left or using keyboard shortcuts. With the tool, we can move the selected elements. With the rotate tool, we can rotate the elements. And with the scale tool, we can scale the elements. What is unique inside the UV editor is this tool called Transform. Basically, it mimics the transform tools that exist into the graphic software such as Photoshop, Krita or GIMP, et cetera. Essentially, with this one tool, we can perform all of the transformations. We can move the elements by click dragging the middle X indicator. We can scale the elements by dragging the square handles on the right, left, top and bottom sides. And we can also rotate the elements now for rotation, it is a bit tricky. You need to hover the mouse cursor past this small line. Until the cursor changes into a plus like symbol. In this condition, you can click and to rotate the selected elements. So those are the tools. If you prefer keyboard shortcuts, you can use all the common shortcuts for transformation that you are already familiar with, such as G for moving R for rotation and S for scaling. One important thing that you need to remember is that in UV editor, there is no Z axis. We only have the X axis, which is the horizontal direction and the Y axis, which is the vertical direction. And so after pressing, for example, you can press X to constrain the movement horizontally or press Y to constrain the movement vertically. If you press Z, it will not do anything. 36. Tweaking, Splitting, and Stitching UVs: In this video, we are going to discuss more UV editing techniques which are tweaking, splitting, and stitching. We will be using the same file as the previous lesson. First is tweaking. The term tweaking is basically a process of selecting and transforming elements in one go. So instead of selecting and transforming using two step commands, the tweak tools can save us time, especially if we have to repeat the process multiple times on many different elements. Then provides tools for tweaking elements inside the UV editor. You can use the Twig tool, the grab tool, the relax tool, and the pinch tool. Please note that the grab relax and pinch tools are officially called UV sculpting tools, not taking tools, but we discuss them together because their functions are very similar, and that is to reposition vertices or other UV elements in one go. You may already be familiar with the twig tool, as this tool also exists in a three D viewport. Essentially, using this tool, you can quickly select and move an element in one go. Just click and drag the element. You want to move around. Now, if your model is more complex or has more dense vertices, you may want to tweak multiple vertices at once. For this, you can still use the twig tool, but with the proportional editing mode turned on. Notice, if I drag one vertex, the neighboring vertices follow as well. To control the radius or the range of influence, you can click on this button and then change the value here. Or you can also hold the left mouse button, and without releasing it, rotate the scroll wheel back and forth. The radius is indicated by the circle around mouse cursor. Smaller radiuses mean fewer neighboring verthess will be affected by the movement. Another way to tweak multiple elements is by using the scope tools. But before we continue, don't forget to turn this feature off and also change the selection tool mode back to the select box tool. Okay. Please note that all of the sculpting tools share the same size and strength primeters the size primeter controls the radius of the influence. While the strength primeter controls how strong the influence is. You can set the values directly on these fields at the top area of the editor. Or you can also use the shortcuts. To control the size, you can press the F key on the keyboard, then you can move the mouse left and right to control the size value, and after that, click to confirm. For controlling the strength, the shortcut is Shift F. In this condition, you can move the mouse left or right for the strength. The maximum value is one, while the minimum value is zero. As the name suggests, the grab tool lets you move multiple elements at once. But unlike the Twig tool which selects the element, the grab tool does not change the selection at all, so it just moves them while ignoring whether they are selected or not. But notice that it can only move one island at a time. If you want to grab to to move multiple Uvilans, you need to open the options menu and then activate the sculpt or islands option. With this, all elements within range will be affected, even if they are on different UV islands. Now to test these two tools, we need to use a model that has a lot more elements. So let's use the monkey head model instead. Currently, these tools do not work very well on a border area of UV islands. I hope this gets fixed in the future. For now, if you need to use these tools, you need to avoid touching the border areas. Just to show you what will happen if you click on a border area instead of expanding, the elements will just string. Let me undo this. You may also need to reduce the size to avoid touching the border area. Okay, essentially, we use the relax tool to spread dense elements. So they space out more evenly. If it doesn't do anything, this means that the elements are already relaxed. We can try the pinch tool first to pull in or compress the elements to the center of the most cursor location. Now we can try to expand them again using the relax tool. So it is basically how you use the relax tool and the pinch tool, right? Next, we will discuss how to split elements in a U Vd. One thing that you need to keep in mind is that splitting only works if you turn off the sing selection mode. So turn off the sing button. And select all phases in a TD viewport so that we can see all of the elements inside the UV editor. The second thing that you need to remember when spitting UV map is that although you can be in any of the element types, I found that working with phases is much easier and more predictable. Let's say we want to spit this island at this age line. First, you need to select either the phases at this site or at this side. For complex UV maps, you may want to use the SlacksoTol you can activate it via the selection tool, but I prefer to leave this as the slack box mode and just use the shortcut instead. For this, you can hold the Control key and then click drag with the rightmost button. Remember, not the leftmost button, but the rightmost button. Just draw a shape that then close the faces you want to select. After you have the faces selected, right click and choose split, and then selection. Or you may also use the shortcut Y. Now you can press G and move the pass as a new separated UVolon. Another way to spit elements is by using this tool called the Rib Regent tool. The way to use this tool is almost the same as the spit command. First, you need to select a phase or phases. Then while the tool is active, you can click and direct the selected phases to detach them from their original UVolen the reverse of splitting is stitching. Essentially, stitching is a process of combining two separate islands so they become one island. For this, you can use either the stage command or merge command. Let's say, you want to stitch this UV island to this UV island. If you want to use the stage command, you need to pick which island should be moving just for example, we want to move this island so it's attached to this one. In such a case, you need to select the vertices or edges on the island. After that, white click and choose stage, or you can also use the shortcut at V. Now, if it attracts more islands than you need, this is due to verticies sharing more than two UV islands. You can and this first and try reducing the number of vertices that you select and then try the stage command again. Another way to stage elements is to use the merge command. But please note that this method only relocates to vertices at a time, not the whole island. Let's say you want to stage this vertex and its vertex, you select both verte cis and then right click and use merge then at center. You can also use the shortcut, which is the letter M. On this how the two vertices are joined together. One important thing that you need to remember is that only vertices that are originally the same vertex in a three D viewport can truly merge together. If you pick random vertices, you can still perform merge. But when later you try to select and move the vertex, you soon realize that there are still two separated vertices. Now you may be wondering how can then we tell the two vertices are actually the same vertex? Well, the easiest way to tell them and even select them automatically is by turning on using selection mode. While this mode is active, when you select a vertex, the other vertices belonging to the same actual vertex will also be selected because they are already selected, you can simply press M and then choose Center to merge them together. 37. Straightening UV maps: In this lesson video, we are going to discuss techniques for straightening UV maps. Usually, if the model is not complicated, most Bundle UV and wrapping techniques can produce nice straight results. But if the models are complex, sometimes you don't get exactly what you want. This is where you need to manually straighten the UV maps. Are at least five methods that you can use in bender to straighten UV maps. First is the manual scaling. The second is the line command. The third is the straighten command, the fourth is the pin method, and finally, the follow active quartz method. Let's discuss each of these methods one by one. The first is using manual scale tensor missions. The key here is to scale the vertices using zero value. For example, you can select these four vertices. If you want to align them horizontally, you can scale them in Y axis, but with zero value. So press then Y, and then zero then enter. As you can see, they are no flat horizontally. Vice versa, if you want to align them vertically, you can use the X axis scale with a value of zero. So press, then X, and then zero, then enter. The vertices are no straight vertically. Now, I know that pressing then X or Y and then number zero is not that convenient. That is why vendor provides deline method. Basically, these methods work just like the manual scale method, but in only just one step to access the line method, you can go to the UV menu and then open the line sub menu. Here are relige commands. So yes, there are actually three variances of reline command. A faster way to access these commands is a right click menu. You can see all line commands here. To use them, you need to select the vertices first. For example, we want to make these vertices straight vertically. Just select them. White click, and then Joe line vertically. For another example, we can select these vertices. White click and then joe line horizontally. Now, if the vertices you want to align are already close to a vertical or horizontal alignment, you can simply use deline auto command. Blender will smartly choose the closest alignment for you. For example, if we select these vertices because they tend to form a horizontal line, performing deline auto command will result in vertices being aligned horizontally. But if you select these vertices, for example, and perform line auto, the result is a vertical alignment. The third is the straightened command. This command can also be accessed via the menu or via the click pop up menu. Basically, this command allows you to align vertosis in any direction that you want, so it does not have to be vertical or horizontal to use it, you only need to set the first vertex position and the end vertex position. Bender will then align all the selected vertoses in a line formed by the two vertoss. For example, I can move this vertex here and then move this one here. Now if I select all these vertices using the Control and click method, and then right click and choose straighten, all the selected vertices will move to the line formed by the two end points or vertices. The nice thing about straighten is that the vertices automatically move perpendicular to the line. In certain cases, you may want the Vertosis to only move on the X axis, or Y axis. In such a case, you can use either the straightened X or straightened why commands. Let me undo this first. So here is the straightened X command. As you can see, the ertosis can only move sideways to intersect the line, and here is the straighten Y command. In this case, the vertosis can only move up or down to intersect the line, all right? The fourth method is the Pin method. Essentially, with this method, you can lock certain vertoss in place and then force bender to recalculate UVN wrapping while respecting the positions of locked vertoses. For example, let's say we want to straighten up the UV ison of the fish area. For this, you can move the top vertex here. And then the bottom vertex here, you can perform line outvo so they are perfectly straight. After that, while you have both selected, you can wide click and choose pin. You can tell that vertex is pinned through its red color. Now in this condition, if you perform Vin wrapping again, Noice the face is now almost perfectly symmetrical. You can repeat the process, for example, by selecting these two vertices, use the align Auto force, and then pin them to perform UV and wrapping besides the three D viewport. You can also do that directly from within the UV editor. As you can see, the result is an even more symmetrical front face UV island. The last method that we want to discuss is to follow active quads. Now, this method is unique because it is actually a U VN rep command. Basically, you need to select an active quad phase for the rest of the pass to follow. So yes, it works on phases. The limitation of this method is that it only works best if your actual model consists of parallel edges, and all of the phases are quads. So the monkey head is really not a good fit for this method. Just to prove this, first, you need to be in a phase mode. So like all the phases, you want to be affected. Just make sure you select the reference phase the less so it becomes the active phase. In this condition, you can open the UVNrep menu. And then follow active quads and just click Okay. As you can see, Blender try to align all these edges to the edges in the active phase. Notice also how this triangle gets left behind because it is not a quard phase. To really see the benefit of this method, we can switch to our T shape model. Let's say our model consists of all quad pass and has nice parallel edges. But somehow the UV map result is screwed. All you need to do is to fix one phase using the align or straighten commands and then select all the phases you want to recalculate. Make sure the correct one is selected as less or as the active phase. And then perform follow active quads. As you can see, other pass nicely follow the active phase, and this also works if the active quad phase is tilted. For example, we can rotate the active phase like this, select the island, and perform another follow active quads, and here is the result. 38. Magic UV add-on: In this video, we will discuss how to use the magic UVAdon. We already installed this add on before. So just make sure you already have it active. Please note that the magic Uvadon has a lot of features. There are just too many to cover all of them in a single video, and probably you won't be reading all of them, also. If you are curious to learn more, you can open this link to access to documentation. As you can see, it is a very, very long list to the bottom. This video, I will only be demonstrating two of my favorite features, which I use all the time for my projects. For practice, I already modeled this very simple house or band of record to save time. As always, if you want to work in real measurement units, the model should have default scale values. So if you decide to use your own TD model, just make sure you have applied the scale. As for the textures, I already downloaded two sets of textures from ambiencg.com. One set is for the roof and another set is wooden pang texture for the walls. All right. Let's say we want to texture this Brnhouse model with a wooden bang texture. Make sure the object is selected, and then create a new material, namely material wall or wood. And then open the shadow editor. Make sure we are in object mode, not the word mode. Now, select the main principle BSDF node. Then press **** Control T. Let's select all of the wooden pen texture, except for this one, as this is just a preview image. Click this button to confirm. Let's switch to the material preview mode to see the texture. Currently, the texture does not show up because the three D model does not have a proper UV map. In fact, it doesn't even have a UV channel yet. We are going to use the magic UV addon for projecting the texture and at the same time, create the UV channel. First, you need to be in the face mode. And then like all the phases you want to sign the UV map too. I know that the roof will have a different texture, but that's like all of the pass for now. Then in the side panel, you will find a tab that says edit. Here, you will see three panels belonging to the magic UV done. Please note that these panels only appear when you are in edit mode. They do not appear when you are in the object mode, except for the copying paste UV map panel. Okay? As you can see in these panels, you can find checkboxes that control the visibility of the parameters. What we are interested in now is the third one that says UV mapping. Here, you can find the two commands that we are going to discuss box and the spanner. Now, notice this option here. If this is on, the magic UVdon will create a new UV map channel for us. If this is off, it will just use or overwrite the existing channel because currently we don't have any UV channels. You want to make sure that this option is turned on. Okay? Now, let's click on this box button right the way, you can see the wooden pen structure on the model. Now, if these yellow selection highlights bothering you, you can actually turn it off. You can do so by clicking on this icon and then turn off the faces option, right? After you click this box button, you can access the less action panel on the bottom left corner of the CD viewport. Notice there is a size field here. Currently, it is set as one, meaning that it projects one texture tile in the size of 1 meter. So again, this number is not 10,000, but one with four decimal numbers behind it. If you want to make the texture size to meter, simply type two here and then enter. Until this point, you may be wondering, doesn't this feature already exist when we use the Q projection mapping? Yes, that is correct. But magic Q Vaden provides more parameters to work with. You can rotate the texture based on local axis, and we can also offset the texture. Just for example, let's say you want to texture projected Yaxs direction to be aligned vertically not horizontally. For this, you can simply type 90 IY axis rotation. I know that this is not the correct orientation, but you get the idea, or perhaps we want to rotate the texture in Z axis direction. We can input 90 here and so on. One thing that I don't like about magic UVAdon at least in the current version, is that it does not use the standard way of naming the UV channel. As you can see, it's giving a name for the UV channel. This is not a problem if you are just working in lender. But when you export the model, other software or game engines sometimes are devoted to f UV channels by the name of UV Map, but at least you can rename the UV channel quite easily. For now, we will just leave it as is, okay? So that is how you use the box projection method using the magic UVAdon the next feature is the best sanar command. The box method is great for straight surfaces or surfaces that are perfectly aligned with local axis orientations. But for slopping or tilted surfaces like the roof here, the texture actually gets distorted if you use the box method. This is where we need the best spanner command. But before we use it, make sure the two faces in roof area are selected. And let's create a new material slot and then create a material. Rename it to roof, for example, and then click this sign button to assign the selected faces to this material. Next, initiate the editor. You can select the main material node and then press Shift Control T. We want to select all the files from the roof texture set except the preview image. Okay. To use the best Pinar command, you need to select only one phase or multiple phases as long as they are facing the same direction. In this case, you do not want to select these two phases together. As the projection result, we just be using the average angle of both phases. So select this phase only and then click the best Pinar button. Now the texture is correctly projected based on a phase angle, but we still need to fix the size and the orientation, which we can easily do by accessing the last action panel. Let's make the size also 2 meters. As for the rotation, we should turn the texture 90 degrees. All right. Next, we can select the pace on the other side. Click the best Panner button again. As you can see, the magic UV addon will use the settings from the last time we use the command. The size is already correct, but the rotation is flip. This should be -90 degrees, and there you have it. Because the magic UV add on does not use the mapping node to rotate the texture, but it rotates the UV islands inside the UV map. It will not break the normal map directions, so it is a very safe, quick, and precise way of projecting texture onto our TD models. That is, if your model consists of mainly flat surfaces, 39. Project: Side table texturing: In this project video, we will add wood texture to side table model. If you remember, we modeled this side table before in basic tree modeling class. Let's have a look at the references first. As you can see, the wood grains are all aligned to the length direction of each table part. We can control its texture orientation quite easily using the magic you will on. Let's start with creating new material for the model. We can name this material wood dot Walnut. You open shaded editor, select the main node, and then press Shift Control T. I already prepared this Walnut texture set that you can use right away. This is the free texture that you can get from the blender kit, you select all of the files. Then click on this button to confirm. Next, activate the material preview mode so we can see the texture. Notice that, because we model it from the fault cubes, it already has a recent UV map but not exactly like the photo reference. You can fix this using the magic UV add on. So go to Phase mode, press A to strike all the faces. Then press and to open the side panel. In the Edit tab, open the UV mapping section and then activate the UVW parameters. Click on the books button to use the command. The first thing that we need to do is decide on the texture of size, but sorry, let's first hide the phase selection highlight so it doesn't get in the way. Okay? For the size, I think I will go with 1.5 meters. Next, for the top part orientation, we can rotate the Z axis rotation to 90 degrees. And then for the sides of the X and Y rotations, let's make all of them 90 degrees as well. With this setting, basically, the top and bottom parts are done. What is left are the middle parts. For this, first, we select all faces, and then select only the faces of the middle parts. We can do this using the shortcut, then we click the box button again. But now we revise the values of DY NX rotation back to zero. Zero rotation will not be visible in these parts, so we can just leave it as is. And that's it. We are done texturing this table model. 40. Project: Wood nightstand: In this video, we are going to add a natural wood texture to our previous nightstand model. Before we only use an off white base color, so there is no need to create any UV map, but now we will need it because we want to create the other variants of the product which uses wood texture. For the UV mapping process, you might be thinking of using the magic UV box projection method. Yes, you can do that, but because some of the surfaces are round, it is better to use other methods to prevent unwanted distortion. Let's start by renaming the material to Wood Walnut to save time. We will just use the Walnut texture we used in a previous lesson. I don't think I need to explain this process again as we have done this about a dozen times. Okay. Now, if we go to the Vent view mode, let me turn this off for now so we have less reflection. Notice that we can already see the texture. So some of the phases are already UV mapped because they were created from a cube object, but other parts still need some work. Let's go to the UV editing workspace, press the home key to zoom in. Press A to select all of the fissures. So here is the existing UV map. Now, if all of the fissures are already mapped like this, you don't actually need the Sims to perform UVM wrapping. Benner will just use the island borders for the same information. Unfortunately, not all of them are mapped yet, while we also have not tagged any edges a SIMs in a TD viewport, performing UVM wrap in this condition will just result in an error. At least partial error. Just to prove this, if you open the UV menu and then proof the angle based method, you will get this error message. In such a case, you actually have two options, either tag the edges as SEMs manually or just use your aromatic projection method. Let's use the later option. So we will use the Smart UV project method as the starting point, click unwrap and here is the UV map result. Let's change the TD viewport mode to material preview. And also hide the face highlights. Alright. The result is quite good. We are getting there. But if you remember the reference, the wood grout in this area should go sideways. To fix this issue, simply disiye all faces and inselet only the pass belonging to the parts we want to edit. You can use the Her and Aa turkey technique for this. Now you can rotate the UV map. Oh, sorry, I missed this part. Okay? To rotate the UV map, make sure your mouse is inside the UV editor, not the three viewpoint. Remember, all blender shortcuts are contextual to the most cursor location. Press A first to select all the visible elements inside the UV editor. Then press R for rotation. Then type 90 and enter. The texture is getting better. All the large flat surfaces are done, but you may notice that the corner area still looks broken. Make a seamless texture at the round corner, you need to select all the faces in this area. You can see that these faces are supposed to be joined together as a single island. To fix this, we can perform the stage command. Let's do the same with all of the round corners. Basically, you need to select one face at one end, then Control click the face at the other end and then click inside the UVEdior and choose stage. And this is last corner. Perform stage so the texture looks nice and seamless, right? H. I think this part and this part are good. For the back part, we need to select all the straight edges at the border and then rotate them inside the UV editor. Select the back part. You also need to fix the border edges at the front area. Now, selecting these front faces is more challenging than faces at the back because it has a curve profile that consists of multiple segments. You need to press Shift and click to select a new phase in a different region, but then followed by Control click, we use the shortest path selection method. Keep doing this until all of the tisses are selected. Okay. Now in UV Editor, press A first to make sure all are selected. Then press R A A 90 to rotate them. Now that we have all the orientations correct, we can scale them all together to make the texture size smaller. For this, we can press A in a TD viewport, then press A also in a UVEditor then press for scale and just type two to make everything twice the size as before. At Hana, it is done. We can go back to the layout workspace to see the model in rendered view mode. I 41. Project: Floor lamp: In this video, we are going to add materials and textures to a floor line model. This floor line model is actually resins product manufactured by a furniture company called Dicen Fournier. It is quite an old release, so I don't think you can find this product unless it is second hand. Basically, the base of lamb is a stone, and rod is wood or at least made to look like wood. Let's start with adding the material for the most intricate part, which is the shade arms. We want it to be copper, so create a new material. And in this one copper. Pick a color that resembles copper. Turn the metallic value all the weight one and set roughness to only 0.1. Next, let's create the material for base. Go to phase mode, press L to select only the base part. Then create a new slot and then assign the pass to the slot, create a new material in the slot and name it base. This should be a stone. I downloaded all the textures for this project from ambiencg.com. For the base, you need to choose the alzo texture set. All right? Next, for the wood material. Dile all faces first, and then select the middle wood part, then the top part as it is also wood. Create a new slot, click the sign button, and then create a new material. Let's name this wood. For texture, you can use these three wood texture files. Okay. Next is the shaded material. Strike all the faces belonging to the shared part. Create yet another slot and unassigned material, create a new material and name this one shade. As for the texture of this material, we can use three fabric texture files. Finally, we need to create a material to simulate light bulb. For this, we can hold out and select this top phase loop Control plus to expand the selection. Then create a new slot and assign the slot to the phases, create a new material in the slot, and let's name it glow. To make the material emit light, you need to increase the emission strength to around 200 or 300. Now, for the light color, we do not want to use a custom color. You see in real world, lamps produce a unique spectrum of light which is measured in gal fin for the realistic results. We want all colors to follow this spectrum. If you select colors outside the spectrum, the rendering may look too fake. Now, to produce this color in vendor, you can simply use a special node called B Body. As you can see, it's not uses vin as the unit. Most people consider white to be at 6,500 kelvin. Lower than that makes the color warmer or hotter, such as orange and red. And larger than that value, we make the color more cool, such as blue. In our case, we want the color to be white but slightly yellow. So let's just use 5,000 kelvin for now. As you can see, it is now a bit yellow. Okay? So the material setup is all done. We can now move on to fixing the UV map. But let's preview the model first in random view. I already looks quite nice from afar. Let's open the editor workspace. And then press Z and switch the view mode to material preview. First, let's focus on the base part. As you can see, when viewed up close, the textures are not properly distributed. Go to He mode, hold out and click on the top H loop. Then while holding safe and out, we can select the bottom He loop and also one H loop in the middle to break up the circle. Next, right click and then oe Mark CM right. Next, make sure all of the base part phases are selected. You can use the shortcut technique. But you can also quickly select the pass the material is. Make sure you have the base material selected and then click on the Select button. As you can see, now all the base paces are selected. Next, because we have the seams already defined. We can use any of the unwrapped means, either the angle base or the minimum stretch because the model is round or more organic, I think I will go with the minimum stretch command, and here is the UV map result. Now, sometimes bender does not show the correct or current texture in the background. Don't worry. I will affect the rendering result, but you can trigger blender to display the texture simply by selecting one of the fishes again in the TD viewport. I believe this is a bug in blender, and I hope it is already fixed by the time you watch this video. Okay? You can perform any transformations on the UV map as you like. For now, I just want to scale this up so that the texture looks smaller. Next is the word part. Go to age mode, and click on this edge at the center of the hole. Right click and then mark in. Do the same with the top hole. Mark them also as SIMs. Next, we can select the outer edge loop. This edge loop goes all the way to the other side. Make these edges a SIMs also. But notice that the edge loop does not go all the way to the bottom. So let's fix that. Select the top edge. Hold Control and click the bottom edge. Mark these edges as SIMs and let's do the same with the other side. Select the edges using the Control key. And then mark SM. Don't forget that the top part of the lamp is also wood, so hold out and click on this edge. And then select using the control method to connect the SIMs. After that, mark them as SIMS. All right. Now go to phase mode. Let's select just one phase to trigger the texture display, select all the pass using the select button. And because the model also looks more organic, I prefer to use the minimum stretch method and we have the UV map. Let's go back to object mode to check the rendition and the size. Currently, the size is too big and it is going horizontally. We want it to go vertically. So go back to phase mode, press A to select, and then press the 90, and then press S and make it to about this big. Let's go back to object mode again to preview the texture. Okay, I like how it looks. Next is the UV map for the shared part because the shape is almost a perfect cylinder. We can just use the cylinder projection mapping. So I'll go to phase mode and select everything for now. Then select the pass via the materialist. Remember, we do not need any seams for projection mapping. So this is enough. Open the UV menu and choose cylinder projection. The texture looks ugly because by default, it uses our viewing angle as the axis reference. We just need to change this to align to object, so it uses the axis direction. All right. The texture is still too big. We can select all of the faces and scale them up until the texture size looks decent. Again, with this bug, you need to select the face to trigger the texture this way and hdulla. I think we are done texturing this floor lamp model. There is only one last thing that we need to do before we can call this wrap. We should see this better in wended view mode. Notice how the lighting from the light bulb does not pass through the shade. To make the shade look more realistic, you can select it and then open the shad editor. Essentially, we want to increase the subsurface effect. And I think I'll go with 0.4. Currently, the color looks reddish. This is because the red channel is stronger than the rest. I think I just want to even these values to one so the shade does not produce any wet color. What I want to do instead is to revise the glow color to be more warm. You can do this by lowering the black body value. I think 4,500 Kelvin is enough. Okay? To see the lighting effect better, we can create a simple wool object just behind the floor lamp using the AD cube tool. As you can see, our front lein model is able to emit realistic lighting just by relying on materials without any real light object. 42. Project: Lounge chair texturing: In this exercise video, we are going to texture a long chair to remodel. For your information, I modeled this from an actual chair product called Hermanohair, which was manufactured by a well known furniture company called Baker. I already did the UV mapping, but I intentionally remove the UV channel so we can practice creating the UV map from scratch. Up to this point, I believe you already know how to set up multiple materials and how to assign PBR textures. Because of that, I have prepared the material assignments and PBR textures of record to save time. This way, we can focus more on UV mapping. Let's review the materials. The first material is the wood material for the front feed. Then we have a good material at the bottom of each foot. And then this fabric is the dominant material. Now, you may be wondering, why do I put a normal map in a color slot? No, this is not a normal map. The color of the fabric texture is blue. I downloaded this texture from htexturs.com. Leader will remap the colors to something else. And finally, we have the fabric for the pillow, right? Now, if you receive a single object model like this and you need to work on a UV map, it will be easier if you first break the object apart. Later, you can join them again when it is done because we already have the materials assigned. There are two ways to break apart the model. But first, select all the pass and then press P. So the options are either to break the model apart based on the loose parts or based on the materials. In this case, I prefer to use loose parts because the chair model has some intricate stitches that we need to work with. As you can see, energy created these objects to contain each of loose parts. This will make our job easier as we can focus on one part at a time. First, let's walk on the front feet. We can select and work with both objects at the same time. Just make sure both are selected. Then to focus only on these objects, we can press Shift H. This command hides all objects, except the selected ones. Let's open the UV editing workspace, and then press home. Now, we want to define the seam for the leg. The strategy to define the seams is not to create them in areas where people can see them directly, because there is a big chance that the texture does not flow correctly at the edges where the seams are. Note that this is the front of the chair, so it should pick an edge on the other side of the feet, rotate the view, and define the seams here. It doesn't have to be perfectly at the center as long as they are not visible directly. White click and choose mark seam. After that, we can use the minimum stretch command to unwrap it, and here is the UV map result. Let's go back to object mode and then activate the material preview mode. Currently, the wood grout is going horizontally. If you like this orientation, then that is fine. But for now, I want to rotate the UV map, so the wood grout is going vertically. Go back to phase mode, make sure all the UV islands are selected, and then press the 90, then N. Go back to object mode. And I think we are done with the fee texture. To any other objects, you can manually click on your icons in the Outliner or simply press out H on a keyboard. Next, we want to focus on a pillow UV map. The pillow actually consists of two objects, the stage and the main body. For the stage, we can go to He mode. Out and click this middle age, and then Shift and out and click on this page. Right click and then Mark ZM. Now, let's focus on the main part. Besides pressing Shift H, which hides the other objects, we can also use the local view mode to focus on certain objects. For this, we can press the fords key on a numpad area. Go to ge mode and select the edge loop at the side. And then click and then choose Mark C. To go back out of the local view mode, simply press the fourth slash key again. Next, select both the stage and the body part, then activate the face mode, press A to select. And then for the UV and wrapping method, because this object is symmetrical, it is better to choose the angle based method. Here is the result. The orientation is fine. We only need to make the UV bigger so that the texture looks smaller. And the set, the pillow is done. Next, we want to define the seams for the stitches of the main fabric first. We need to select all of them. So after selecting one, hold sheaf then keep clicking to select the others also. Okay. Go to the local view mode. Then press Shift Z for the wireframe mode and then press seven to activate the top view because we want to hide the seams. We want all of them to be located at the back side of the chair. You can do this easier in vertex mode. Select all these center vertices at the back, and then switch to the edge mode, white click and then mark SM. Next, we need to set the edge loops that go along the stitches out shaft and out, and just click on one of the edges of each stitch. Make sure none is left behind. And then mark them all as seems. Okay. Let's go back to object mode. Then go out of local view mode. Now, we want to focus on the cushions, select the bottom one first, activate the local view mode, and then go to the edge mode, rotate the view. So you see the backside, select the edge loops where there are supposed to be the stitches, the one at the top, and also the one at the bottom. Next, we need to select one edge loop at the center from the top seam, all the way to the bottom seam. Again, this is useful to break the circle so that the UV map can be created perfectly flat. Mark them all as seams. For percussion, the process is pretty much the same, so I'm speeding up the video to save time. The last part is the back rest. It may seem complicated, but if you model the object correctly, you should be able to select new seams easily, simply select the edges where the stitches are. Now, we need to backtrack careful in this area as there is one small edge here. I can get easily missed. I think the rest is pretty self explanatory. So I am spinning up the video again. All right. Now that all the seams are tagged, we can press A to select all the objects and then press Control J to join them all. Now we are back only having a single object. Next, go to phase mode. The select all of the faces and then select only the ones with the fabric chair material because the object is symmetrical. It is better to use the angle based UVM web method. So here is the result. For the orientation, I think all of the fabric lines are going in the wrong direction. I want them to go from back to front and also go vertically. This back part also goes horizontally, which should be vertically. So let's just select all of the UVolins and then rotate them 90 degrees. And then let's scale them all so that the texture of size makes sense. All right, I believe we are done with UV mapping. The last step is to fix the fabric material so the color is more aligned. We do with gold colors. Let's go back to the layout workspace. We should see the changes better if we are in random view mode, hide the edges for now. And sorry, I think we can hide the scene word so we don't see any background. To change or map the blue color to other colors, we can use the color ramp node. We used this before, so I'm sure you already know what it does. By the way, the color becomes gray scale because of the default black and white color nodes. Change the black color node to a brown color. And then change the white color node to a beige or cream color. And because it is fabric, it should look better if we add a bit of shin effect. Let's try 0.3. I think this is too strong. Let's just use 0.2. As for the shin color, we can change it to be more beige. Finally, I think we should also add a in effect to the pillow, select the material, and then set the sin strength to 0.2 and make the shin color to be a bit blue. Okay, so this is the final result. Oh, sorry, guys. This area is still not correct. The fabric lines should go vertically, not sideways. Let's fix this quickly. We can select the feces using the shortcut, the right side also. And then in the view Veritor, we can route it both islands for 90 degrees. Ah Lila, I believe it is really done now. Let's go back to the rendered view mode again. So here is the final result. I