Blender Beginner to Pro: Texturing

1. Into: Have you ever had a model you're super happy with in Blender, but then you get completely lost in the texturing process? Well, that's okay. It's a complicated process. And in this class, we're going to look at building your confidence in your texturing skill set. So it off. I'm Southern hotty, and in this class, we're going to walk you through the basics of texturing and Blender. We'll be going through the process of how to UV Unwrapping model and use tools like Node Wrangler. We'll also look at PBR textures and how to apply them. After that, we'll demystify some of the most commonly used Shader Nodes and then use those same notes to create a procedural material entirely within Blender. And finally, we're going to go through the texturing tools themselves and how you can paint textures onto your objects. Now, this class is intended to take you from a beginner to a professional level, and we're going to walk through every piece of the process step by step. However, if you've never opened Blender before, you might want to go ahead and take a look at my getting started with Blender course first, which will walk you through how to use the interface. Now, I've spent over a decade working in the industry of Fortune 500 clients, and now I want to help you build that same creative career. Blender has become a major player in animation, visual effects, and tech, and it's only growing from here. Now, whether you're aiming to work in games, films or interactive media, this is one of the most valuable tools you can learn to jump start your career. So, let's get started. 2. The Material Tab: Blender has a material tab that can be applied to any object which also includes material slots. Let's take a look at the material tab and break down how it works. Let's talk about how to even apply materials to our object. When you click an object, a material tab will open here. When you click this, this will take you to the material properties. And your only option here is to add a material or add material slots. Let's click New here. Let's call this blue. Now, I'm going to change the color, the base color here to blue. Now, if I open up this menu here and I open a Shader editor, we can see that we can do a lot of edits to the materials that have just appeared on our object. Cover this in later lessons. So I'm going to close this for now. But we can add additional slots here to have multiple materials. Let's say that I want the eyes to be a different color. I will go here, add another material slot. Click New. I'm going to call these eyes, and let's say that I want those eyes to be black. But nothing happened. And that's because I need to apply it to that part of the model, which we do in edit mode. I will tab into Edit mode I will grab the portions of the topology that I want to apply this material to. So I'm going to grab the center dot on the e here, hit Control plus, just to grab the faces there, and then click Assign. Now if I tap back out in the object mode, I now have one material here on the eyes, and then I have one for the rest of the body. If I click this button here, what I will do is open materials that are all within the scene already. So if I actually wanted, I could change this to blue, come up and change the entire robot to the eye material. So these are just slots that you can insert any material in now, it's worth noting that when you close Blender, it will delete any unused materials you have. So let's say you create ten materials in this scene. If you save Blender and only two are in use, it will delete the other eight materials. To prevent that from happening, we can click this option right here, which is fake user. And by doing that, it will trick Blender into thinking that this has a user whether it is on an object or not and will not delete it on Pan saving. There's also another button here, the new material slot. Let's come down here to blue. Let's say that I changed my mind. I don't want the eyes to be blue. I want them to be red, but I'd like to keep the blue material. I'm going to turn on the fake user here, and then I'm going to click new material because I want it to be the same exact material, just red. So I'll click new material. It'll make a new version of that and add a number at the end. So I'm just going to rename this to red. Then I can change this color to red. And if I change my mind again, I can click back and go to the blue, as well. Now, when I go to this list, you may notice the next to some of these. That stands for fake user. That's just letting you know that you have this button toggled on. Let's say that I want to clear the material of this slot. I can just click the X here, and that we'll remove all materials. I can then select another material from that list. Likewise, if I decide I don't need this material slot anymore, I can just delete it up here. So I will just remove that material slot. If I come over here to this character, you can see that for the final texture, I have several materials on this character. I have one on the battery, which is the screen right here, the eyes, the head, the ligaments, and the body. Let's see what happens when I tab into Edit mode. If I want to see what these materials are assigned to, I can grab the head, for example, and click Select, and we'll select everything that has that material on it. By, let's grab everything here and do deselect. If I wanted to grab everything that was not the head, I could do deselect that will deselect the head, and I'm going to deselect the eyes, and let's say that I want to use my body material from before. Well, I could grab a new material slot, grab blue, and click Assign and make the object body blue. And that's a basic overview of the material properties panel. 3. PBR Materials: Let's take a look at PBR materials, which is the industry standard for material pipelines across games, film, and visual effects. This was actually developed in part by Disney to create a consistent result across all their toolsets. So let's dive in and look at how we can use this pipeline and Blender. Back in the early days of three D, we didn't have realistic lighting or materials. Instead, the lights in the materials were a bit more abstract and artists and animators had to change lighting and materials every scene to try and get them to match visually. This was the problem that Disney was trying to solve and where PBR came from. Stands for a physically based rendering. It's a way of creating materials that follow the real rules of how light behave in the physical world. So instead of faking how things look in each scene, instead, your materials will react realistically to the lights placed in your render engine. Now, the power of PBR comes in the fact that it's consistent. A material you make in Blender will look nearly identical in unreal engine, unity, or any other PBR based render. They're also extremely efficient. You don't need to hand paint shadows or highlights. The lighting system will take care of it for you. And they offer a severe amount of realism. You can create anything from shiny wet mud to frosted glass all based on the same rules. Now Blender has a great universal node called the principle BSDF node. And this node allows us to plug in image maps. So when you download PBR materials, it'll come in a set of image maps, each controlling a different property of the surface. Let's look at some of the most common maps you'll get. There's the base color or the albedo. This is the pure color of the material without shading or lighting baked in. This plugs directly into the color socket. The metalness map tells Blender if a surface in metal or not. Again, it's a black or white image with everything being black, non metallic, and everything white being pure metal. Now there's normal maps which are cyan and purple or bump maps which are black and white. Both of these will add fake surface details by telling light how to bounce off of the object. But this doesn't alter the geometry and it's very fast to render. When plugging this into the normal section, you will need a normal map node for normal maps or a bump map node for bump maps. Both will plug into the normal socket, however. The roughness map controls how shiny or matt a surface looks. It's a black and white image that goes from everything being perfectly smooth at black. To perfectly matt at white. This plugs directly into the roughness slot. Lastly, there are extra maps you'll sometimes get, including a displacement map, sometimes called a height map. This works like the normal map, but it actually displaces the geometry. This plugs into a displacement node, which plugs into the displacement on the output node here. The problem with these is that they are extremely CPU intensive and will take forever to render. So only use these when absolutely necessary. Lastly, is an emission map, again, going from black and white, black being no emission, one being full emission. If you plug this into the emission socket, you can then set the color here and determine how the object will emit. This is actually something we'll do with the screen on the front of our robot. Now, ambienc is a great place to get a bunch of free materials. I'm going to link to this in the description, and what I want you to do for this lesson is to pick one material and follow along. I'm going to click this rock material here, and I'm going to download the PBR maps. Going to download a two K file size, and I'm going to use this in Blender. Talk about how we can apply a PBR material to our object and Blender super quickly. Now, here I have an object here with a PBR default material on it. I will save this as a template, and I will split my screen into two. The view port here set to render mode with the scene world turned off just so that we have the generic HDRI lighting the scene. And then over here, I have a Shader editor window where I can see the Shader of my material. We'll be going over some of these controls and upcoming lessons, so don't worry if this is intimidating. Come up here to edit preferences. Under add ons, I want you to search for Node Wrangler, and Enable Node Wrangler. This is included with Blender for free. What this does is enable a bunch of shortcuts in the Shader Editor. We'll be going through all those shortcuts in an upcoming lesson. Now, what we're going to do is hit Control Shift T with this selected. So hit Control Shift You're going to navigate to the files that you downloaded, and you're just going to click and drag and grab all these color maps. Don't need the ambient inclusion. Now we're going to click this button to import it, and we can see it's automatically apply the texture to our object here. Let's look at what each one of these maps does individually. G to click and drag this up here, and then I'm going to grab the image editor here, and we can look at these objects one by one. First, we have the color. This determines the color of our rock. I was to unplug this, you could see that we would have all the remaining details, but no color, which I can adjust here. So I'll plug that color back in. Next, we have the roughness map. And one thing I want to make clear is here that you can see all the remaining maps for their color space are set to non color. And that's because all the remaining maps are not viewed as color, but just pure data to blender. So if you don't use the Control Shift T method, make sure you change the color space down there. Next is the roughness map. Let's take a look at what that looks like. Can see here that this is a black and white image, and that is plugged into the roughness socket here on our Shader. And what that is doing is determining the roughness of our object. Everything black will become shiny and everything white will have a value of one, and we have maximum roughness. So if we plug this back into our stone here, you can see that overall, it's relatively rough. Next we're going to take a look at the normal map here. You'll notice that this map here is purple and cyan colors. And Blender is actually looking at this and trying to fake lighting data. So let's take a look at what that looks like. We can see here that if I were to come up here and rotate the scene, how it is simulating light moving across the object. But if I switch back to solid mode here, we just know that this is a flat sphere. So normal maps are used to simulate the idea of depth on a surface that has none. This is a great way to add lighting detail to your object without increasing render time. Now, displacement maps can actually change the geometry, but they're much slower to render. Let's take a look at what that looks like. I'm going to mute the normal map and enable the displacement map. And you'll see here that at first, it just looks exactly like the normal map. It's not really changing much and just looks like it's kind of barely simulating some lighting data on it. Look at how we can make this actually affect the geometry. First, we need to change a setting under the material settings. We will come down here with the material selected, come to the settings, and on the surface, we can see that we can change displacement. Right now it's set to bump, and a bump map is very similar to a normal map. It just uses black and white data instead of purple Sian data. It's not quite as accurate. Let's go ahead and change this here to displacement only. And you can see that now our object is going to kind of splurt in all directions. If you don't see any difference, your displacement scale might be set to something super low. So I'm going to set this to one. This doesn't look realistic at all. Let's set this back to zero and see what our displacement map looks like. We can see here that it's a relatively realistic crack texture. So what's wrong here? I'm going to go ahead and re enable everything here and turn this back up to one. Well, the problem is, we don't have enough data. If we look at our object, it's very low poly and a displacement map needs a high poly object. So let's add a subdivision. We'll come here to the modifier, search for a subdivision, and we can see that helped a little bit, but it's still not exactly the look we're going for. So there's actually an option here called Adaptive subdivision. What this will do is look at the displacement map and add geometry as needed in order to allow it to displace Greci. Now, I want to warn you that this will slow down your renders dramatically. You should try and avoid using displacement maps unless it's your only option. But already, we can see we're getting a much more realistic stone texture. Now, unfortunately, our scale is set to too high. So let's just lower this to something like 0.1. Now you can see we're getting actual geometry that is bouncing off of our object. Let's re enable our normal map. When we combine these two together, can get a relatively realistic looking stone effect with a combination of a normal map that has micro details and a displacement map that is actually changing the geometry. Let's take a look at where it plugged in all of these textures. The base color was plugged directly into the base color of our principal BSDF node. The roughness was plugged directly into the roughness node. The displacement map needs an extra node here called the displacement node. You can access that by hitting Shift A and searching for displacement, and it'll be under vector displacement. See here this was plugged into the height, and then the displacement was plugged up into the displacement here. Here, under the normal map, you can see that the normal map also has an additional node. It's plugged into the color and then plugged into the normal here. There's also another thing called a bump map, which does the same thing, but a bump map has less data in it and is not as accurate. So always use a normal map when you can. You'll also notice that when it imported, it changed a lot of these color spaces to non color, and that's because only the color map is recognized as color data by Blender. The rest is just recognized as pure data. So if you're not going to use Node Wrangler, make sure that you set the color space to non color on everything aside from the base color when plugging it in. You'll also see here that on the normal map and the displacement map, we can control the strength with these strength settings on the normal map and the scale settings on the displacement node. For now, I'm going to disable the displacement node. We're going to take a look at how this PBR material looks. 4. Node Wrangler Shortcuts: Let's take a look at all the shortcuts associated with the Node Wrangler node, which makes it much easier to work with nodes in Blender. Pressing Control T on any node with a vector node on the left side will automatically plug a texture coordinate and mapping node into the vector slot. Control Shift click will preview a Nodes output. You can see here I'm looking at just the base color, just the metallic, or just the roughness. If I click it again, it will go down to the next socket below, so in this case, the Alpha. I can control click the original node, and it'll bring it back to default. Holding control and dragging the right mouse button will cut node links just like that, and you can do this to multiple at once. Shift clicking and write dragging will allow you to add a reroute node. You can then just grab this node and press G to move this around and organize your lines. Control Shift T on a principle BSDF node will import multiple PBR textures and automatically place them into their collect slots, which we saw in a previous lesson. Pressing M on a node will mute that node, and pressing M again on a muted node will unmute it. If you select multiple nodes and hit Shift P, you can add them into a frame. With that frame selected, you can press F two and name it and call this anything you want with a name at the top to keep things organized. If you want to remove a node from this, you can hit Alt P with the nodes selected, and it will remove that node from the frame. Now, of course, these keyboard shortcuts aren't necessary, but they certainly help move through the Shader editor much quicker and efficiently. I will also put all the keyboard shortcuts I just covered in the class resources so you can use that as a cheat sheet. 5. Common Shader Nodes: You open the Shader menu and you see all of these node options, it can be absolutely overwhelming, especially if you're new to texturing and Blender. So what we're going to do in this video is look at some of the most common nodes used in material creation, how to use them. And then in upcoming lessons, we're actually going to use these same nodes to create some procedural materials together. Now, with that being said, Shader creation is an incredibly complicated topic. In fact, there's entire roles dedicated to this on full feature pipelines, which is why I'm recommending that after you complete this class, maybe come back and rewatch this lesson specifically. The fact is that after you have more hands on experience with these nodes, coming back and understanding their purpose and intent might actually give you a deeper understanding of how to utilize them in your own material. Enough talking. Let's dive in and take a look at some of these commonly used nodes. Now, you can access all the Shader Nodes in the Shader Editor menu, which is where you can build out your materials in Blender. To access these nodes, you can either hit Shift A just like you would with primitives in the Viewport, or you can come up here to the ad menu and look here. If you're struggling to find what you're looking for, when you hit Shift A, click Search and you can search for it. For example, I can search for bump Node and click and get that node here. You can also drag off of nodes, and it will automatically give you a search menu. So if I wanted to look for A image texture, I could do that in that way as well. And when done this way, it will automatically connect the two. And delete nodes by pressing the delete key or the X key, which will automatically delete it and its connection. Now, let's take a look at the most commonly used nodes in Blender and what they're used for. Layer wait, lets you control effects based on the viewing angle of the camera, useful for things like lighting or fresnel reflections. This is actually how to get that fake rim light effect you see in supermoGalaxy. You can control the strength with the blend option here at the bottom, and you can choose to output either the fresnel or the facing faces as the determining factor. Bevel node simulates adding bevels to the edges, softening sharp edges by faking a small bevel which helps catch highlights and adds realism without extra geometry. This will not replace the bevel node, but if being can be great for adding small details to sharp edges. Now, geometry nodes a bit more complicated, but it's great here because it gives us the normal information, which we can then mix with other nodes, for example, in this scenario here, to create a edgeware mask. The light path node provides information about how light rays reach the surface, direct, indirect reflections and. Sounds complicated, it's because it is, but I want you to pay attention to the top one here, the I camera array. This one's super simple to use and extremely useful. Let's take a look at a sci fi object here. I can determine what objects are visible to the camera or not. So we're going to plug two emission shaders into a mix Shader node here, and then to determine how to mix those, we will plug the I camera ray. Now, with one of these emission shaders, we can control the strength of the emission in terms of how it lights the scene. And with the other one, we can control the visuals of the emission. This is great because sometimes to cast a lot of lighting in your scene, you have to turn the value so high that it completely turns all of your emission elements white, and that's not always what you want. The texture coordinate node tells Blender how to map textures onto your model, whether it be by object space, UVs or camera projection. The generated node here will try and generate coordinates with blender's best guess. This yields mixed results unless if you have super simple objects. The UV will default to your UV maps that you've placed on your object. The object node allows you to use an object selected here, to control the coordinates of your texture. This is great for animating textures. I actually use this to animate the displacement noise map on this fire here to generate this fire animation. Camera will project the texture from the camera view. The problem is, if you are animating your characters or moving the camera scene, the textures will move around. However, if you have a still scene, this can be a really simple and fast way to project complex patterns on objects. The mapping node lets you move, rotate or scale textures after they're applied. So you can fine tune how they sit on your surface, including tiling your textures by increasing the scale. Oftentimes, these are paired with a texture coordinate Object info outputs data about the object's position, rotation, and scale. But what I use it for most often is this random option down here. What this will do is when a material is applied to a object, it will randomize per object. So if I take this random, plug it into a color ramp here, choose several colors, and plug it into the output of the base color here, and then I duplicate these books around my scene, you'll see that it is randomly choosing colors from that color ramp for every new object duplicated. Is a great way to add variety to your scenes quickly. The ambient inclusion node adds an ambient occlusion pass to the objects with the materials applied. It adds shading to small crevices and corners, making them look darker and giving surfaces extra depth and realism. This is great for things, for example, like brick, where you want to darken the shadows in the crevices and bring a little bit more attention to the depth. Brightness and contrast adjust how light or dark your textures look with the brightness or how strong the differences between light and dark areas with the contrast. Hue saturation and value lets you shift the color and the hue or make it more or less intense with saturation and control how light and dark it appears overall with the value. Curves give you fine control over color and brightness by adjusting the curve here in the middle. It lets you brighten mid tones, darkened shadows, or tweak individual color channels here at the top. The mixed node blends two inputs, usually colors, shaders, or textures into one output. The factor slider controls how much of each input is used. Factor zero would be 100% of input A, factor one would be 100% of input B. Factor 0.5 would be a perfect blend between A and B. Think of it like layers in Photoshop. You're deciding how much of the top layer shows versus the bottom layer. Kind of like mixing paint, slide towards one color for dominance or leave it in the middle for a blend. You can also plug masks into the factor here. For example, we could plug a grunge map in and mix two colors together. This one is used quite frequently in procedural materials, as it enables a lot of control and mixtures between maps. The color ramp node remaps values into colors, letting you turn black and white data like a grani mask into a custom color range. Can also use this to adjust and alter maps by crunching the contrast. This one's used quite frequently to alter image maps or to inject random colors into your object. Map range takes an input value and shifts it from one range into another, like turning numbers 0-10 into a new scale of zero to one. The map node performs simple math operations like add, subtract, multiply or more on values. This is useful for fine tuning textures or combining effects or altering things like noise. Vector math does the same thing as the math node but just operates an entire vector. If you don't know, vectors are when you have a X Y and Z numbered together. Useful for things like measuring distances, normalizing directions, or combining motion. This one tends to be a bit more complicated than anything you're likely to use, but it's good to know that it's here. Separate XY, Z splits a three D vector into individual X, Y, and Z components, so you can control one direction at a time. Now, that might sound complicated, but a great use case of this is to plug this with a color ramp node on a gradient node. You can control the direction the gradient goes, whether it goes in the X direction, the Y direction, or the Z direction by changing the input here. The brick texture procedurally generates a repeating brick like pattern with control over brick size, mortar thickness, and colors with plenty of options here. The checker texture creates a simple checkerboard pattern, great for testing UVs or making stylized surfaces. The gradient texture produces a smooth transition between values useful for fades, masks, or stylized shading effects. Bone texture generates organic cell like patterns based on distance between random points. This is great for things like stone, skin or abstract effects. The wave texture creates a repeating wave patterns in lines, bands, or rings, often used for stylized surface or distortion effects. This is great for wood patterns or creating stripes. The image texture loads an external image file like PNG or JPEG and maps it onto your three D model using UVs or other coordinates. You can also create new image maps here, which is great for creating things like UV grid. Or texture paint maps. The principle hair BS node is a shader designed specifically for rending realistic hair. Now, hair isn't a flat surface. It's like a thin cylinder. So when light hits it, it doesn't just bounce back, it bends around, scatters throughout the strands and reflects. This aims to do that while not taking very long to render. It has a color and melanin section to define natural hair colors such as blond brown black by controlling the pigment concentration. It has a roughness and randomness option. Adjust how shiny or matt each strand is and adds natural variations from strand to strand. It also has a radial roughness, which controls how light spreads along and around the hair strand. There's also the IOR selection, which fine tunes the strength of highlights and reflections in the hair. Now, just like the object impo node, we also have a curve impo node, and we can use this to plug things into the hair BSD, and generate some pretty cool effects on our curves. For example, we can randomize some of the color hair strands with the color ramp or we can change the color from the root of the hair to the tip of the hair. The principal volume Shader node plugs into the volume output instead of the Shader output, and it's designed for rendering materials that aren't solid surfaces, but instead fill up space. Things like fire fog or clouds. The density will control how dense that object is or how thick the volume is. The color will tint what that looks like. A common trick is to add a noise into the density here and get a much more realistic looking fog when placed in your scene. You can also place this over objects with lights and get volumetric lighting in your scenes as well. Now, there's another model type called VDB models, and simulation software for smoke and fire will export VDB models. If you buy or download some of those models and import them into Blender, you can plug them into the volume here and use the black body intensity to control the intensity of the fire or explosion simulation that you've imported. The principle BSDF Node is blenders all in one Shader. It works on almost every surface, and it combines many shading models into one easy node. So instead of building complex networks, you can just create wood, plastic, glass, skin or metal with just a handful of sliders right here. It's the Swiss Army knife of shaders. Let's look at some of the key controls, the base color, which will be the main cutler of the material, metallic, which will tell Blender if the surface is metal or not, roughness, which will control the shininess or the mat of your obj. Secular, which will adjust the strength of non metal reflections, higher values equal stronger highlights, the normal sump input, which adds surface detail for fake lighting information, the transmission here, which is used to make materials see through like glass or water, the index of refraction or IOR, which controls how light bends in transparent materials such as glass or water. There's a clear coat option here to add an extra shiny layer on top, like car paint or varnished wood. There's also a subsurface option. This simulates light scattering under the surface, useful for skin. Wax or marble. You can plug image maps into all of these for PBR materials, or you can utilize all of these individually to build out procedural materials within Blender. Let's take a look at how we could create a simple wax material. First, we'll choose a color up here. I'm going to choose a color like a darker yellow or orange. I then want it to have light passing through it. So we will turn the subsurface scattering up to one, as well. The problem is that the light is passing through my entire object. I just want it to pass through the thin bits or the edges. So we will take a layer of weight node, plug a color ramp on it, and then we can plug this into the subsurface strength. We'll only get that pass through lighting around the edges of our object, giving us a more realistic wax looking texture. This is just one example. Now, we just covered a lot of nodes, and it might be hard to digest, but I encourage that you return to this video after completing the class and watch it one more time after you have a better understanding of some of the nodes, and it might help you think about how you could use these in your own projects. 6. Procedural Materials: Strength of procedural materials is in the name itself, the fact that they are procedural, meaning that we can make adjustments to the Shader Nodes, and we can tweak our materials per object as needed. For example, in this video, we're going to be creating a wood material, and because we're creating a procedural wood material, it's very easy for you to adjust things like the wood grain size, the color, or the amount of grunge, something that we're not able to do with PBR materials very easily. Download the wooden Blender file here, you'll find a great little starter file that we're going to use. We have a object here with a wood material on it. You can also view the final wood material we'll be creating as well. So let's take a look at how to create this using entirely procedural nodes. So by default here, we will have a basic material with a principal BSDF to get us started. So let's start by adding a noise texture. I'm going to hit Shift A and search for noise texture. I grab that noise texture, I'm going to hit Control T, since we have Node Wrangler add on Enable, it's going to add a texture coordinate and a mapping node. This will allow us to control the size and scale of our noise texture a bit easier. But first, I'm going to grab this UV and plug it into the vector here, so that instead of generating coordinates, it's using the UV maps that we'll use on our character. Let's take a look at what these noise texture controls do because we're going to be using this for a lot of our wooden material. I'm going to hit Control Shift click here, and this way, we can use the noise on the object. I'll be using Control Shift click a lot to preview our materials to see what we are doing. So it's good to get comfortable with that shortcut. Go to hit Shift A here and search for a color ramp. If I drag this here, I can bring the black down and bring the white to add some contrast on our object here. Now let's take a look at how these controls affect our noise. If I adjust the scale here, you can see it changes the size of the noise. The detail here will add more detail to that noise, smoothing it out or not. The roughness value here will change the roughness of that noise, and the distortion here will distort that noise. Over here, since we have the mapping node, we can rotate things or we can add scale here and stretch it out. You can see how already it's starting to look like now to reset the values, all you have to do is press backspace over a field. So if I just go down here tapping backspace, it'll reset all these values to default. So let's create the first section of noise we have here. I don't want this to be quite so contrasted, so I'm going to set it to something like this. So we can see our noise, but it remains with some detail. Now, I want to scale the noise. So let's take the scale here on the y axis and scale this up so that it stretches out our noise vertically, kind of looking like wood grain. I'm going to set mine to something like ten. Now, I want to turn the roughness up, giving it a little bit rougher of a look. And I also want to introduce a tiny bit of distortion. So I'm going to put about two distortion here. And you can see already how this is starting to give us a base wooden look. But we can do better. Now, I'm going to zoom out here, click and drag to select everything, press the G key to move it and move our noise over here. Now, with all these selected, I'm going to hit Shift D and drag this whole setup back down here. I'm going to hit Control Shift click here, and now we are previewing this node setup. I'm actually going to set this to something more extreme, like 20, that'll give us a much more refined look. Let's introduce the scale of the noise, too. Set this to something around ten. Then we'll leave the rest of the settings here. But instead, we're actually going to crunch this down and try and create small little speckles. So I'm actually going to flip the color ramp here, dragging the black past the white, all the way down here. If I zoom in here, you can see how I'm starting to get little dark lines, kind of like little wooden and grain mints, variations of color. Great. Now we want to mix these two noises together. Let's look at how we would do that. I'm going to grab both of these and move them over. Go to hit Shift A and search for a mix color. That's going to give us this node right here. Now, we can plug these values into the A and B here and adjust the opacity between those layers. Gonna grab the first noise we made, put it in A, the bottom noise we made, and put it in B. Now I'm going to control shift click here and preview this. You can see that if I move this factor here, it is shifting from either A to B. I'm going to leave this all the way to one, but I'm going to change the mix mode here. I'm going to change this to multiply. What this is going to do is take the black information from the bottom layer, which is B and multiply it on top of the A layer. So it'll get rid of all the white information and save the black information. That looks like this. And you can see that now those small streaks are mixing in with our previous noise layer. If I were to turn down the opacity here, you see that they disappear. We're going to be using this trick a lot. So let's actually create another noise texture layer. We're going to grab these two right here. We don't need the texture and the mapping coordinate nodes for this one because we're not going to be adjusting the mapping. We'll bring this up we will preview this layer. I'm going to reset all these to the default settings by pressing backspace, and I'm going to lower the contrast ever so slightly by bringing this further out. Now, for this one, what I want to do is create a really fine, small noise because if you look at wood, there's just thousands of colors mixed into it with all these little kind of micro details. So we're going to try and simulate that. Let's bump this up to something really high. I'm going to try 500. I'm also going to bump the detail all the way up to 15. I'll raise the roughness a tiny bit as well, too, maybe something like 0.9. With that, I've created a simple noise layer that we can now multiply back over our previous noises. So again, we will take this mixed color node here. Let's just duplicate this here. We'll plug this color here into the top, this color here from our previous one into the bottom, and let's see what we're doing here. Now, I've left it at multiply with a factor, and now you can see we're getting a general noise that is applied to our overall wood adding a little bit of realism. Now, let's do that same thing and add another layer of noise. So we will duplicate these up here by hitting Shift D. Control Shift click here to view what we're doing. And I'm going to reset all of these nodes here. I'm also going to reset the color ramp by clicking the drop down menu and resetting there. So now we're back to default values. Now with this one, I want to create a broad, grungy look. So I'm going to reduce the scale to something like one, and it's hard to see what we're working with here. So it's really crunch this down and create a high contrasted. Just like that. I'm going to up the detail maybe to something around nine or ten, and you can see we're starting to get a better look there. I'm going to turn the roughness up here, and you can see how now we're getting kind of a splotchy grunge look, which is exactly what I want. I'm going to come over here to the mixed color note, hit Shift D, and then I'm going to drag the color ramp we have here and to the A, and then I'm going to drag the color we have down here. To B. I'm going to Control Shift click this, and we can see that now we are multiplying this grunge onto our wood. Now, a lot of wood has scratches on it. So let's actually import a grunge texture. So if you downloaded the project resource files, you should see this grunge map scratches that I've included for free, and this is the map we're going to use. So if we add a image map above here, by hitting Shift A, looking for image texture, you can click Open here and select that file. I already have it imported, so I'm just going to click Grunge Map scratches right there. I'm going to grab this and hit Control T, which will add a mapping node. I'll Control Shift click there, and we can see what the scratches look like on our object. Now, I want to change the scale these so that there's more scratches. So you can go ahead and increase all of these, but a simpler way is to hit Shift A and search for a value node. This allows you just to plug one number into all three of the scale values. So let's say that I want to scale it by five, and now we can see that I have scratches appearing all across my object. However, we've been multiplying and doing the black over white, and this is the inverse of what I want. So if I hit Shift A and search here, I can find a invert color node, and that will invert the color. Now, it's very subtle. So we're going to add a color ramp node. Click that here, and then we're just going to bring this black all the way down until the scratches become visible again. Now we have scratches all over our wood. So again, we will grab the multiply node here, Shift D. And I want to put these scratches on top. So we'll drag this into the B, and we'll drag the previous one into the A. Let's take a look at that. Now you can see we've got a pretty good base for our wooden color there, but we need to actually add some color. So it's time to start using our principle BSDF. I'm going to drag this node over here onto the surface, and we're going to start working with our details. First, let's do the colors. I'm going to shift a here and add a color ramp. This time we're actually going to use the color ramp to add some colors. So let's add a few extra colors here. Just going to add a couple extra nodes there. Now, if I click this dropdown menu and distribute drops evenly, it will spread across the entire color ramp evenly. Now all we need to do is pick some colors that we want to mix into our wood. So I think for this color here, I'm going to pick kind of a darker brown with a little bit of purple mixed in for some stylization. For this one here, I'm going to start bringing in the base of the brown there, but I want this to be the darker portions of the brown, like that. Here I'm going to start bringing in some warmer browns mixed there into the mid tones here. Here we'll start working towards our lighter values, again, bringing in a little bit more of a desaturated brown. So for this last color, I'm going to pick a lighter tan brown, maybe introducing a little bit of yellow just for stylization. You can play with all the colors you want here until you get a stylized wood you like. Now, if you want to just make minor adjustments and not change all your colors, you can actually use a curves node here. So if I search for RGB curves and drag this over, I could, for example, darken the darks there and lighten the lights and pull in some more colors. So if I drag down on the red there, I can pull out the reds and maybe introduce them back into the highlights. Really just play with the colors until you find something you're happy with. But next, let's look at the roughness value. So everything we plug into the roughness value that is black will be a value of zero, and everything white will be a value of one. So we're going to create a semi glossy wood material here. Utilizing our other noise textures. So we can grab this final texture here, and we're just going to drag this off and search for a color ramp. What that's going to do is plug it into a color ramp. We'll hit Control Shift T to look at this. Now, you can see here that we have a lot of blacks and whites. So if we plug this directly into our roughness, you can see we get a pretty unrealistic result. So let's actually take a look at the roughness map here. We don't really want that much glossy on this type of wood. So we will grab the black here, which is going to be pure glossy and we'll just raise this value way up reducing that contrast. If we plug this back in, you can see that we have some roughness variation, but overall, it's pretty matt, giving us kind of a nice varnished wood look. You can also add a coat, if you like, to make this almost look like a wooden table or floor, and you can plug this into the roughness as well and play with that. But I'm going to leave mine looking a bit more natural like. Lastly, we're going to use a bump map because a bump map does the same thing as a normal map but uses white and black information. So we're going to grab the multiply node here at the end, drag this off, and we will search for another color ramp node. We can take a look at that and see our mask there, but let's add a bump node. So we will search for bump, and now we need to plug this color into the height. This will take the black and white information and turn it into a bump map for our object. Plug this into the normal and our color here into the height. Now I'm going to bump the strength up to something like 0.25, and you can see how now we're starting to get a bit of variation on the surface of our object, giving us a somewhat nice looking wood material. Now, this is the one we created together during class. If you like, you can also see the one I made previously, which has adjusted settings little bit more warm or of a stylized look. Now, keep in mind that you can go back through and play with all of these settings here and the colors and keep adjusting until you find a wood that you like to look of. So as I said before, I had this wood previously in the scene, so I'm actually going to call this one wood, warm, and then I'm going to call this one wood dark. And the only real big difference between these two are the color and the color ramp settings here. Everything else is pretty much the same. And I'm going to use both of these wood materials on our robot. This is the advantage of the procedural materials that we can just come in here and tweak any of these settings and completely change the look of our wood. It's fully procedural. Now, I encourage you to make a couple variations of wood that we can use on the robot, or if you want, you can use the two variations that I've included in the file here. 7. Group Nodes: Awesome thing about using Blenders Shader note tree setup is that we can actually create groups and then reapply these to materials, speeding up future material creation. In this video, we're going to look at how we can add some simple edgewar to some objects. Now, to start this lesson, I encourage you to download the metal starter project file, which has the final metal Shader in it and the starter metal Shader in it. It also has a basic object we can use to kind of show off some of the effects that we're. First, let's take a look at the metal starter material, and we're going to look at the values on our principal BSDF here. We want to create a metal object. All we need to do is turn the metallic value to one. Now our entire object is metal. If I turn down the roughness here, we can see that a bit better. I'm also going to choose a warmer color for bimetal here. Give us something more like a kind of bronze or L. Now, this gives us a very flat looking metal. So let's create something a little bit more interesting. We're going to use some procedural nodes to create some natural wear and tear that will occur across the edges, and we'll also add a bit of interest here with some grunge across the overall metal material. First, let's look at how we can do a natural edge wear and tear. Well, first, what I'm going to do is hit Shift A and look for a beble now, the bevel node is searching for edges to try and create a bevel effect, which means it's a really great way to detect the edges on an object. We're also going to add a geometry node. The geometry node will look at all the information we have about the geometry here. We're looking for the normal data, which is the direction that the faces are pointing. So if we combine some of the normal data with the edge data, we can isolate that and use it to drive a few effects. So we're going to search for a vector math. We're going to do a dot product here and combine both of this data. Now, if we take a look at this data, we can see that everything looks white, but we're getting faint edges here. But what we need to do is map the range. So right now, we have data that's kind of sprawling out there, and we need to condense it down. So we can use this to one input that data, and now we can see our edges a bit easier by flipping the data down there. Also want to crunch this down so that the value range isn't so wide. So I'm going to type in 0.99 there. You can see now we're getting a much stronger edge highlight there. Now, I just want to pause because we did a couple nodes there that are a little complicated. So dot product math has to deal with normal math in the direction it's pointing, whether it'll be a 01 value. So essentially, what we did is take the normal or the direction the faces of the object are going and take that to combine with the bevel data. Just looking at the edges, as you can see in this mask here, and combine that into a map range. And the map range node can just remap that information. So we basically took a wide breadth of information and crunched everything down 0-1 down to 0.1 to one. And then down here, we inverted that information. I understand this may still be a bit complicated to follow, but that's what's going on here. And hopefully, as time goes on, the stuff will start to come to naturally make a bit more sense as you get more experience with. From here on out, this jaders pretty simple and straightforward. So let's look at how we can adjust this. By adjusting the radius of the beble, we can actually make larger edges, which is exactly what I want. I want the edge wear and tear to move all along the object. So let's go ahead and plug that into our node right now. By plug this into the roughness, you can see that now the edges are rough this doesn't look that great. So let's introduce a bit of noise into it. We're going to add a mixed color node and drag that over the top node here. And now we're going to mix noise into the bottom. So let's grab a noise texture node by hitting Shift A and searching for noise. And let's grab this factor and search for a color ramp like that, and we will plug that into the color. Now we're starting to get better of a result. Let's mix this factor up to something like maybe 0.7. I'm going to do a multiply mixture, and you can see how it's starting to mix into our object there, but it could be a bit more contrasted. So it's maybe bring the black down here and the white up here. Now we're starting to get a bit more variation in our edges. However, the noise is super large. So it's maybe bump the scale up to something like 15. I'm going to add some detail there, maybe increase the roughness. And if you want, you can copy my exact values. Now, if I plug this back into the BSDF node, you can see that we're starting to get slightly better results, where's just adding some general wear and tear across the object. I want to control this further, what I can do is add another color ramp here, and then I can play with the values here until I get something I like. I'm going to bring the whiteness up, and you can see how we're starting to get some wear and tear along the edges. But I feel like this could still be better. These large faces are just broad and flat and have no information on them. So I've actually included this grunge map. You can download it. I'salled Grunge map number seven, and we're going to add a image texture here. You can click Open here, wherever you downloaded or it's included in this file, so we can just click here. By plug this into the roughness, you can see that we're getting a pretty great look overall. Let's actually grab this, bring this down and hit Control T. I'm going to hit Shift A, look for a value node, and plug this into the scale. I'm going to bump up the scale to something like three and give us a nicer look there. Now I want to mix this with the edge information. So let's click Search and do a mixed color Node. We'll drag this into the B slot and our edge into the A slot. We'll turn the factor up to one there, and then we can search for a multiply or a screen node, depending on the results you want. This is looking pretty extreme. Really don't want my metal to be this rough looking. So I'm actually going to add a color ramp after this grunge map here. So I can actually just duplicate one of these color ramps and drag it over there. Then I can begin adjusting this until I have a setting that I'm happy with. This gives me kind of an overall grungy look, but still some shininess to the metal. So what we can do is we can add a bump node here to add some more details. So I'm going to add a bump note, drag this screen mixed color into the height, and drag this into the normal. This is making all the grunge pop off, but I'd actually like it to look like it was worn into the metal. So if I click Invert, you can see that now it looks a little bit more natural. If you want, you can play with the strength there and continue to adjust the settings here. But now we have an overall grunge metal look that takes into account the edges. Now, it would be great if we could reuse this node on other materials. For example, if we wanted to add edgewar to our wood and this general grunge. So there's a simple way we can do that. First, let's unplug everything from the screen. I'm going to hold Control and click here and let go, and that's just going to remove all the nodes at once. Let's click and drag to select everything here and hit Control G. Will move us into a new screen called a Group. We have the group output and the group input. So let's drag the things we want to adjust in the input. Maybe the scale of the noise and the radius of the edge there. If you press the end key and open this panel, you can change those names with that selected. So I can say noise and edge size. Now if we come over here, we can determine what's outputted. So let's output this final screen result. If we press tab, we'll tab outside of the group. Now you can see that we have a note group here. And if I hook Control click this, we can see that this is the map that we had. We can change the noise size there and the edge size. Feel free to plug in more things into the input if you want more control. We can also name this Edgeware and then we'll be able to use this on any material we want. Now we can plug it into the roughness and our height of our bump, and you can see that now we have this dynamic edgeware group, and we can use this across other materials. For example, here, if I go back to my wood material, I can input the edgeware group here, plug that into a mix shader with the original color and a color going through a altered curve, and you can see that this is driving the mask there or how those colors are being produced, giving me a grungy looking wood very simply. But next, let's look at how we can apply these materials to our actual robot character. 8. UV Unwrapping Explained: Video, we're going to look at how we can UV unwrap our models. Now, this tends to be the tedious first step of texturing, and luckily, with Blender, we have some tools to do this automatically for us. So we're going to first look at how to do it manually ourselves and then some of the automatic tools with the pros and cons of both approaches. Let's talk about why we even need to UV unwrap our objects. So when we're working in three D, our objects exist in three D space. They can move in the X, Y, and Z coordinates. And just like in edit mode, our objects are pieced together with elements that exist in the X, Y and Z space. Our objects are three D and have three coordinates. However, when it comes to texturing, we're working with a two D image texture. This only has a X and Y coordinate, and in fact, that's what UV stands for. U stands for the left and right, and V stands for vertical up and down. And we need to think about how can we apply this TD image to this three D object? Well, that's where things like seams come into play, and we can actually break apart our object in a way that we can wrap our tote texture around it, almost like if we were placing a sticker on a toy to add some texture. In this cube example here, you can see that each face has been spread out here and it is almost laid out like a piece that we can fold back on top of our object to apply this texture. Let's take a look at a more complicated example. You can see a beautifully textured character from the Blender open source game they recently released. Now, this file can be downloaded for free Blender org, if you'd like to take a look at it yourself. Over here, you can see the texture we have for the character. And we can see the hat here, pieces of the coat that the characters wearing, the shoes, the pants, the hair, and the face, and the nose. If I turn on the overlays here and select the topology of our character, we can actually see what that looks like over here, and we can see how our model has been cut apart and pulled apart and placed over here so that the textures can be then reapplied to the model. Blender know where to cut and split up these objects? Well, it's with a feature called UV SMs, which we can place manually. If I rotate around this object, you can see that there are various portions here marked with red lines in edit mode. Those represent SMs. And that's telling Blender, Hey, you should cut and split the model from this point. You'll notice that a lot of these points are placed in portions that are hidden. Bottom of the face here or the top of the scarf, which won't be visible or on the back of the object where you're less likely to see it. If I select an object here, for example, the top, you can see exactly where they are cut. We can see here that the top seen up here represents the top of the scarf we're seeing right there. And we can see this line back here occurs here. So the front of the jackets here, and it moves around to the back where it is cut down the middle. If you're wondering why a lot of these seams are placed in hard to see areas, for example, here on the back of the hat, that's because when your seams don't match perfectly, you can sometimes end up with seam artifacts. And by hiding these in places not as likely to be visible to the viewer, you can prevent these artifacts from being seen. Now, you might notice that the character over here is spread across several sections. There's one section for the face, one section for the nose, one section for the hair. You'll notice that when I look at these objects while selected, they sit in their retrospective areas. If I grab the nose, it sits over here in a selection, and the hair sits over here in a selection. These are called UV islands. Now the reason we look at creating clean islands like this is to prevent something called UV stretching. UV stretching happens when the flat map doesn't match the three D surface. Causing textures to warp and distort across the three D model. The best way I can think to describe it is that if you were going to sew a shirt together, you would cut the fabric pattern for your shirt into a sleeve, a collar, and a torso and then sew all those pieces of the fabric together. Just like that, that's how UV maps fit across a model. And clean islands with low placed seams give Blender a better pattern to work with in reducing distortion. So what makes a clean island or a good seam? Let's take a look at how they unwrap this torso. I'm going to zoom in here on this torso. We can see that they have one top seam, one bottom seam, and one seam right down the back. We look at how Blender breaks it apart, it makes it so that we have one top section, one bottom section, and that allows the torso to unwrap into just one long horizontal block, making this very easy to texture. Now, Blender actually has a great tool to help us see the amount our UVs are stretching. If we come up here under the overlay menu, we can turn on angle. And what this will do is show a map over our island from blue to red with blue, meaning there is no stretch, and red, meaning there's a maximum stretch. You can see here, this is very nicely unwrapped and it's entirely blue. Let's redo this torso but poorly so we can see an example of what that stretch might look like. With this model selected, I'm going to press to bring up the UV mapping menu and I'm going to clear all seams. Now I'm just going to add a simple line. Let's say that we want to add a UV seam right along here on the back, but we don't want to take off the top and bottom. Let's see what that looks like. Going to press, Mark Sm, grab everything. Plus U, and then I have various unwrap options here. I'm going to focus on these three. This will unwrap it with an angle based thing, trying to maintain the angles of your object in space, great for things like wooden planks or minimum stretch, which will try and minimize the amount of stretch. Let's select that option. Here, you can see that it has smeared my object all over the scene. I'm starting to see blue transition up to green and red with a lot of poor stretching. And you can see here that because the object hasn't been broken apart into pieces that would be easy to sew back together, we've kind of created a mess. This shows the importance of placing proper seams. And we're going to look at how to do this on our robot character and teach you the entire process. Let's take a minute to talk about overlapping with UV Highlands. You can see here that none of my islands are touching. There's a space in between these, and this is called the island margin. If I were to take this island, which is the front piece of my bird over here, and I move it over we now have what is called overlapping UVs, and you can see here that's creating artifacts as both of these UVs are fighting to use the same piece of the texture, leading to inconsistencies visually. This can also be problematic if your margins are too close. If I grab this object here and just move these ever so slightly close and zoom in here, you can see how I'm starting to get artifacts that appear where the edges overlap and create bleed through. However, overlapping is actually sometimes used on purpose, especially in things like video games. Or example, we'll overlap UVs to reuse things like grass blade textures to populate across many objects in a scene. I want to talk about one more thing before we begin unwrapping our character together, and that is the texture resolution and how that relates to textil density. So we can see here on these two flamingos I have here, I have a four K texture, and this texture looks relatively high resolution. However, if I were to zoom in way on my character here, we can see that things become blurry and low Rz. Just as if I were to zoom in on the image itself here, how things would become blurry and low rez as we got super close it. The problem is, if you take your UV islands and you place them incorrectly, you can end up with low resolution looking sections. Let me show you an example. Right here, I have this portion of the body selected. And if I were to come over here and look at the texture, I can see that this has about a 200 by 200 pixel area. However, if I were to scale this down, it would only have about 20 by 20 pixels. And you can see how over here, inversely, that is making it look low resolution and blurry. Even though we're viewing from far away, because it has so little resolution to work with the texturn. And this is called pixel density or the pixel density of the UV islands as they apply on the texture. Now, I understand this may be a very foreign concept or complicated to understand if this is your first time UV Unwrapping or working with texture. Fear not. It's a pretty simple problem to solve. Blender has a UV grid texture that we can apply to our object and use while UV Unwrapping. We'll be doing this together while working on our model. And as long as you keep the UV grid relatively the same size across your entire object, you will end with a result that has good texil density. 9. Unwrapping Our Model: Now if you've been doing the entire series, you should have a project file that you can start with. However, if you are only taking this class, I've included a robot starter file that you can use to follow along. Likewise, if you're concerned about your final results, I will also be including the final unwrapped object, so you can reference that as well as an example. Now before we begin, we're going to apply a UV grid material to our character. A UV grid is just a generated grid image that will assist us in the process of UV editing to ensure that our UV islands are clean with the proper textil density. So we will grab our model here. Click Nu. We'll name this material UV map. Come down here to the base color image. We're going to click this socket, choose Image Texture, and then here we can create a image. I'm going to click New and name this UV grid. You can set whatever resolution you want here. I'm going to do a two K texture of 2048 by 2048. Now, down here on the generated type, you can choose blank, color or UV grid. Choose UV grid and click New Image. Now we want to make sure that our texture is visible. So we're going to come up here and we're going to go to the material Viewport setting. Now, it's going to look just gray right now, and that's because we don't have a UV unwrapped, so it doesn't know how to apply this texture. Next, what we need to do is click and drag up here and we're going to open the UV editor view here. Now, if I tab into Edit mode here and select everything, we can see what our UVs look like. Since we haven't unwrapped everything, you can see it's just a mess of data. Now I'm going to switch back out into object mode here. I'm going to click the negative Y up here, which will snap me into front view. Let's take a look at a few shortcuts we're going to be using together. First, I want to teach you the key. The key will select everything linked to the face that you selected. Here you can see how it selected the entire object. If it doesn't select the entire object, open your linked menu here and select by normal. You can see here how I am grabbing each object individually when I press L. If I want to deselect an object, I will hold Shift L. I'm going to twirl down this menu here as I don't need it anymore. I'm going to press A to deselect everything that I have selected. We'll be using that quite a bit. And I can also press A to select A when nothing is selected. The other menu we'll be using is the Unwrap menu. And this will be very useful because here we can press U to get the Unwrap menu. You can also access that up here under the UV if you can't remember that shortcut. We'll be using this menu to not only actually do the unwrapping, but also to Mark and clear SEMs. Now, to Mark and clear Seams, we're going to be working in the edge mode up here. Is the easiest mode to grab scenes. We can grab edge flows by shift selecting, or we can Alt click and grab entire edge loops. Now, one more thing I want to show is that if we have an object selected, for example, let's say this I, we will select this I with L, hold Control I, and that will invert the entire selection. And then we can press H to hide. That way we can just focus on our I. When we're ready to unhide the selection, we can hold Alt which will undo the hiding. Let's begin by doing the legs first. So I'm going to snap into the front view here. I'm going to press L and grab all the pieces associated with the leg. Now I'm going to hit Control I and We're going to hide the body there. Let's focus on the right side here and look at how we can split this up. We can see here that with our feet, we have a bottom piece that would probably be good to cut off, and then we want to unwrap the entire sphere. So maybe we should look at doing an unwrap line on the back. So let's start with these calfs first. I'm going to shift click and grab these lines here, and then I'm going to Alt click on this seam right here. And that'll cut off the bottom of the foot and then open this to spread it out. Now, I'm worried that this line right here might cause it to do a weird stretch. So I'm going to click this as well. Now if I press the UK and click Mark Sam, we can then deselect by pressing A, L, to select the item to unwrap. And if I click Unwrap minimal stretch, we can see that we're getting a pretty good result over here. Where the UV grid looks even across our entire object. Now, this is where the UV grid becomes helpful. We want this UV grid to look relatively the same size across our entire object, and we also want it to move in relatively the same direction to ensure that if we have anything, for example, a wood pattern, it will move in the correct direction across our object. See here that we're getting a UVCM in the back, which is exactly why we put it back there so that it shouldn't be viewable to the viewer very often, if at all. We're going to tab back out into Edit mode here, and we're going to do this sphere now as well. Let's Alt click here and Alt click here. This will split the sphere in two. But we have these kind of inside lines that need to be cut off as well. So let's click around this loop and around this loop. Going to press U, Mark SEM and then I'm going to select both of these. Press Unwrap with minimum stretch. Just as a reminder, this is trying to unwrap while minimizing the amount of stretch of our UVs. So let's click that, and you can see that we get a pretty good result. And we can see that the UV grid is almost the same size as our calf here, meaning that overall this is looking great so far. Now let's do the front of the foot here. We're going to hide these two pieces of the leg. So let's press L over these pieces and hit H to hide. So now we can see what we're doing on the foot. So let's add a seam across the back of the foot here, and then let's also take the seam around just a bit here to allow that top to split. We'll hold Alt click and click here, press, Mark seam, and then we will grab this here, press and minimum stretch. And we can see that we got a pretty good result with the back being invisible to the viewer. If I tab out back in the object mode here, we can see that our grid is looking even across the entire object. I'm going to move back in the Edit mode here, press H, and then we're going to move with the feet objects we have here. You can see that we have two objects there, and let's Alt click this loop here and this loop here. Now, let's Alt click the middle loop there and the middle loop. That's going to do is cut off the top pieces here and split it down the middle. We'll press and Mark SM. Now, I'm going to click off away there and deselect that. Let's do this bolt next. Let's do the top of the bolt like this and add one line there. So I'm just going to shift click and select that line there. We're going to do Mark S. Now we can do all these objects at once. You don't have to do it one object at a time. So I'm going to switch into wireframe mode here, which you can do by clicking up here, and then I'm going to have the box select selected, click and drag and select all of the topology there. I'm going to press U and Unwrap minimum stretch. You can see here we had a successful Unwrap. I'm going to switch back to material view and see how that looks. By tab on on the object mode here, we can see that our UV looks relatively clean and similar in size across the entire object. The calf here is slightly bigger in its grid, but I don't think it's enough to be problematic, and we can look at ways to fix that later if we need. Now, let's do the same thing to the other leg. So I'm going to tap back here into Edit mode, and I'm going to deselect by clicking off to the side. I'm going to hold Alt H to unhide everything. And I'm going to grab one of these seam lines here. So I'm going to grab this line right here. I'm going to come up here to select, select similar and Seam. And what that's going to do is select all the seams and the scene here. Now what I'm going to do is do select, come down here to select Mirror. You can see now it's grabbed all those same exact areas on the legs over here. So I'm going to press Mark Seam. Perfect. Now we'll grab all these leg pieces. We'll press U, unwrap minimum stretch. And you can see we're running into an issue. Now that we've unwrapped it, this grid is much larger than this grid. And that's because when you unwrap a piece of an object, Blender only focuses on that piece of the object. So we'll unwrap it as what it thinks is best for that. So if I were to re unwrap this foot now with a minimum stretch, you can see how it's much larger. So what we need to do is select everything at once. So I'm just going to grab everything here on the feet. I'm just mashing L across everything. What we need to do is unwrap it all together. Unwrap minimum stretch. And you can see that now Blender is doing its best to match the pattern and the size of the grid to minimize the stretch across all of these. We can also see what it looks like at angle based. If we do angle based, it's going to do its best job to try and maintain the direction and angle of that grid. However, you can see that the grid sizing is a little bit off. So it really depends on what your priority is for that unwrap. This is looking nice and everything's looking even. Let's go ahead and unwrap the rest of the body. Let's do the arms next. We'll click here, press L to select all of these pieces here. And we'll do that on both sides. Pick Control I and H to hide the body. I'm going to switch to front view by clicking the negative Y up here and zoom in on our arm. Now, I'm just going to do the same thing for these that I did on the leg. I'm going to add one edge loop here, one edge loop here, one here and one here. Just as a reminder, I am Alt clicking those edges to select that loop. Go to press and mark Sam. Next, let's do the forearm. In the meantime, I'm going to select both of these and hide those. So next let's unwrap the forearm. I'm going to come up here and select this edge loop here by Alt clicking and this edge loop. I'm also going to select this edge loop here on this piece of the forearm. Now, I'm going to add the seam here on the bottom so it's not as visible. Going to shift click across here and grab that seam until it goes up there. Now I'm going to press, Mark Seam. Perfect. I can grab both of these, press, and just make sure there's no problems. Now I'm going to hide that piece of the forearm. Let's do this little compression piece that exists between the two arms, as well. We'll take off the tops and put one seam down the middle. So we will click this, Alt click this, and then we'll put our seam on the bottom by Alt clicking. Press, Mark Sam and let's take a look at what that looks like. So I'm going to unwrap this, and you can see we have a very nice horizontal texture here. With two caps at the end, just what we want. So let's hide that and focus on the hand next. Now, these are cubes, let's look at how we can split these up easily. We'll grab this seam here, and I'm going to grab the bevel edges that go down just like this on both sides. Then we will grab this bevel edge right there and this bevel edge and right there. Let's mark seam and see what that looks. Going to grab the object here and unwrap. You can see it's kind of working, but we're getting some stretching there. So let's actually add one more split. I'm going to grab the seam here. We will come up on both sides, just like this. Let's add a seam there and re unwrap it. And you can see here we're getting a much more natural shape that looks like it won't stretch or cause issues as much. Now, all of these are cubes, and we're going to do the same exact pattern on all of them. So I'm going to fast forward through this section, but just do the same exact thing on every cube. Want to call out here that if you accidentally select edges like this, all you have to do is hold Shift and select them again to deselect them. Now, I have set all the seams on those, so I'm going to press Alt H here to unhide my arm. Then what we're going to do is just grab every piece of the arm by pressing L there, and we're just going to unwrap with minimum stretch. So you unwrap minimum stretch, make sure that everything looks okay. I don't see any major problems. So I'm going to deselect that. I'm going to grab the seam here, select similar seam, and we'll do select mirror. And now it's grabbed everything over here, so we're just going to press U, Mark SM. Perfect. Now we have equal seams on both sides. Next, let's do the ears and the eyes. So I'm going to grab both of the eyes, all these pieces of the ear. Then I'm going to hit Control I H. Now for the eyes, we will grab a loop here, and we will grab one more loop up here. And that'll allow us to split this into one section, this inner bevel into one section and the entire eye into one section. Now, I don't want to create a line down the center of the eye. I'd rather keep this in one circle. So I'm going to grab this top edge here, Shift select, and then just grab this down until we get into the inside here, right by the eye. I accidentally grabbed one here, so if I hold Shift Click there, I can just undo that. I'm going to press U and Mark. Let's look at the ears over here. Let's alt click add a loop here, add a loop here, and then we'll just add one down the middle. Alt click, add a loop there, Alt click, add a loop there. Let's add Markem. Now, the ears here are a little bit more complicated. So what I'm going to do is hide both of these earpieces. And with this, we're going to focus on how we can kind of cut this. Going to treat it almost like we did the cube. So let's add a seam right here. I'm going to click here, we can see that seam goes all the way around. And what that's going to do is split this ear into two pieces. Let's also give it some breaking points here. So we will shift click along this edge corner up here, along this edge corner here. We'll give it a breaking point here as well, and one down here. And then we'll go and do that on the reverse side as well. Giving it some points for the ear to kind of break and open up. Let's mark the seam and take a look at what this object looks like when we unwrap it. So I'm going to click away to deselect, Hold L, unwrap minimum stretch, and we can see that we've essentially split the ear into two pieces, which is exactly what we wanted. Let's press Alt H, and we will grab the seam here, select similar seam, select mirror, and then we will press U, Mark Sam. Everything that's mirred can be mirrored across. And next we're going to focus on the head, the body, and the hips. Let's do the head next. So we'll select the head here, hit Control I and H. Now, the head here is a pretty simple one. We're just going to click these loops here and press U Mark Sam and then we're going to grab from the back of the head here, go down a middle seam just like this, and we'll do that across both of these pieces. For the bottom piece here, I'm only going to break it down to the halfway point, allowing that to split and open up. Also add one seam here, allowing this to open up a bit and not stretch as much. We'll press you, Mark Seam. Let's test what this looks like. And we can see here that things are opening up and stretching pretty well. There is a bit of a concern and that this is a little bit tight, but that's going to be on the inside of the character and not really visible. So I'm not terribly worried about it. Let's hit Alt and unhide everything. Next, let's focus on the body. So we'll grab the bolts on the body here and the body pieces itself. And then again, we'll hit Control I H to hide everything so we can focus on the body. First things first, let's get these bolts out of the way, as they're pretty simple. So let's just click here on these edges of the bolt and also grab one edge on the top each. Don't forget there's some bolts up front as well, and we'll grab these same exact edges. I'm just going to use, Mark Sim then I'm going to grab all those bolts and just hide them. So with those bolts selected, I will just press Now let's focus on the body. I'm going to view the body in a few sections. The big front section that's very important. The big back section and the flat piece here, and then we have this middle section. So let's begin by grabbing a few basic edge loops based on what we've been doing. Going to click this edge loop here, this edge loop, come over here and grab these as well. Going to press U, Mark Sem to get us started. Now, we should split these up a bit. So let's grab this edge loop here and Markem, and let's grab an edge loop down here on the back and Markem. We should also split this big object up as well. So let's add a seam down here as well. Now, the screen, I want to treat a bit separately. So I'm going to grab this edge loop here, and I'm just shift clicking with the Alt selected, just like that. And we're going to mark a seam there. And that way, we can kind of get this screen section out in its own thing. I also want to grab the screen itself just right here and turn this into its own seam, as well. So I'm going to mark seam and later when we go to put a screen on, that'll save us some time because we will have this as its own island. Let's see what this looks like. Let's grab everything, do and unwrap. Now, up here under the overlay mode, I'm going to turn on the angle stretch, and you can see that we are getting a ton of bright blues, meaning we're getting a lot of stretching. But it's a bit difficult to know where this is coming from just by looking at the object and the island maps. So we're going to scroll over here. I'm just middle mouse clicking to scroll, and I'm going to click away, and I'm going to turn on this button here, UV sync selection. Now when I press this, all the UVs remain on here even when the object isn't selected. If I press L over here, I can select islands. So if I grab these three here, that are the problematic ones stretching and hit Control I to invert, what I can do is hide everything that doesn't have any stretching issues. And right away, we see one of the problems is that our body actually has an inside piece to it. You've been following along to this point with the chorus, you'll know that's because we used a solidify modifier with our model. What we're actually going to do is just delete the inside of this topology. So I'm going to click the X here to snap in a side view, go into wireframe mode. I'm going to switch over to face selection here, and I'm just going to use the box select to grab all of these faces. Go to press X and delete faces. Now if I hit Alt H, you can see here that it hasn't changed the look of our body at all. We only deleted faces on the inside. So what I'm going to do is grab that body again so we can focus in I'm going to press L to select, and you'll see here it didn't select the entire object. That's because the L shifted back to Sam mode. I'm just going to click normal, twirl this down, and just grab those object pieces again, just like that. It Control I, H, and we can look at our body again. I'm going to switch here to material view to make that grid a bit cleaner. I'm going to grab everything here, do UV minimum stretch, and you can see we have much less stretching here. There's no longer any stretching around the basic of the object. How, we're still getting some stretch here, and that is this front face here. So let's look at how we can fix that. We'll hit Control I and hide everything else, and we're going to focus on how we can split this up a bit more. This two had a solidify modifier, as well. So we can delete these faces inside. I'm going to switch to the edge loop mode here. I'll click this edge loop right here and hit Control plus twice. That'll delete some of the faces in the inside and fix some of our issue. Let's unmap this one more time, we can see that we're still getting a lot of stretch here. So let's come over here to the UV editor. Click the face button here. This will allow us to select the faces and grab these ones that are the most problematic. We can see that they're along these edges here. So I think we may actually be having an issue because it's not cutting here. So I'm going to switch back to edge mode there. Going to Alt click this one here, press and actually get rid of that seam. And instead, I'm going to Alt click these corners here and add a seam. If I grab and press U to do a minimum stretch, we can see that we've gotten rid of the majority of the stretched blue. Now we're ready to unwrap our entire object. Let's hold Alt and our entire object should come back into view. So next, let's focus on the hip. I'm going to press Alt H and bring everything back, press A to deselect everything or click off to the side, and then I'm going to press L to select the hip here, and I'm going to press Control I and and we can focus on unwrapping this hip. First of all, I actually kind of want to split off these areas here. So I'm going to grab this seam all along the edge here. So I'm just going to shift click, and this one will just take a bit. And I'm also going to do the same for the edge loop here on the inside. With those selected, I'm just going to press Mark Sm. Go to click off to deselect here, and I'm going to click there down the center of the sphere, and I'm going to click down here in the center of the hip and I'll click down here. So we have one line moving through it all. We will press U Mark SM. We will press A to select everything. We'll do a minimum stretch. We can see we're getting a tiny bit of stretching around some of these corners, but most of that will be unvisible, so I'm not going to worry about it. So now we're ready to unwrap our entire character. 10. UV Packing: We will hold Alt H. We will select everything at once by pressing A, and we're going to do U Unwrap minimum stretch. Now let's tap back out in object mode and see how this looks. We can see that the UV grid looks relatively the same size across the entirety of our character. Now, where I might be concerned with textil density is if I saw something, for example, the head here, I just scale this up, where the UV grid was much smaller on the head and everything else was much larger. But in general, everything looks relatively the same size, so that is great. Now, we're planning on doing a wood material on our character. So one thing that does matter is the direction of the UV grid. And we can see here that everything's moving relatively in the same direction, except for these four arms here. Which are going off on an off canted angle that doesn't match the flow of the arm. So let's grab this in edit mode here, and we're going to press L over our forearm there and locate that over here. We can see that the piece of our forearm here is actually this piece right here. So if we select this piece here, we can grab it in this view and press R to rotate. So I can rotate this until it gets relatively in the same direction. That's great. Now let's do the same thing with this forearm, as well. So I'm going to grab that piece, find where it exists up here, press L over here, I'm going to R to rotate until that's kind of moving into relatively the same direction. Now we have an issue. These islands are overlapping. I could try and scale these down and move them over, but then now the texiltnsity doesn't match, which is also an issue. So what should we do? Well, Blender has a tool called Packing Islands. If I select all these islands by pressing A and then come up here to the UV menu and click Pack Islands, I'm going to get a bunch of options. Packing islands is when Blender takes all the islands we have here in the UV and tries to pack them in the best way it sees fit for textil density and avoiding overlap. So what I'm going to do here is turn off rotate and leave on scale. I'm going to hit pack, and what that will do is not rotate any of our directions, but instead, rescale everything so that it fits here. Now, if I tab back out in the object mode here, you can see that we have a relatively general direction that all of our grid is going and everything matches here on our size. Let's return back to that Pack island tool and talk about its importance a bit more. By default, if you leave all the settings on, Blender will just try and pack the UV islands in the way it sees most efficient to fit inside that image. But we also have the option to control, the ability if it affects the scale or the rotation. With rotation, it can try and match the object's rotation and give you the correct rotations or with the scale, it can try and move things around and make sure that the textil density is correct, as well. We also have the option down here for the island margin. And with the island margin, what we can do is increase that margin, which will increase the space between islands and prevent bleed through when working with lower resolution textures as we showed before. 11. Auto Unwrap: Earlier, I mentioned using the Auto Unwrap. So if we tap in edit mode here, select everything, going to press U, and we're going to use Smart UV Project. Now, there's a couple Auto Unwrap options down here, but Smart UV Project is the one you're going to use 90% of the time. So let's click that. I'm actually just going to leave the settings here at default and click Unwrap. Let's tab back out in Object mode and see how it did in comparison. At a quick glance, it looks fine. The textil density and the direction is great. However, if we zoom in here, we can see that because it added scenes just automatically at random, we're getting portions where things are not lining up as nicely as they are and are original here. So when should you use Auto Unwrap versus manual Unwrap? Well, if you're planning on having patterns that are going to move across your character, for example, a checkerboard, a fabric pattern, or a wood pattern, you probably want to manually unwrap. However, if you have generic colors or if you're planning on texture painting, everything, then using Auto Unwrap is usually sufficient enough. 12. Applying Our Materials: You've been following along to this point, you should have a fully UV Unwrapping model. However, if you've skipped ahead or you struggled to do the UV Unwrapping process yourself, I've provided a project file called robot UV Unwrapping Complete, and you can start with this project file. Here we will see we have our robot character here in our object, and there's one UV map material. Let's look at how we can take the materials we've created and apply them to our character. Now, first, we're going to want to import them into our scene. So if you've been following along, you should have a few project files. We're going to go to File Append. This allows us to import parts of other projects. I'm going to click Append here, and I have a folder with all the projects we've been working on. So I'm going to go into the wood blend here, grab the material folder, and I'm going to import the wood dark and woodwarm. And now if I click here, I can see that it can apply those to my character. Let's also append the metal Shader, as well that we did with the wear and tear. So I'm going to click up here to go back up and go to the metal material and import metal finished. So now we're ready to begin applying materials to our robot. Let's grab our robot here, and right now we just have one material on the object. Let's grab the woodwarm. That's going to be the main material I want to use on our character. If you're not already, click here to switch into the material view. You can also take a look in the rendered view. If your scene is dark, you can turn off the scene world temporarily, and that'll allow you to select a preview HDRI. Just keep in mind that you'll want to turn this back on to see accurate lighting results in your scene. I'm going to work in material view. I'm going to drag this open here, and I'm going to open the Shader Editor menu here so that we can make adjustments as we see fit to our materials. So I'd actually like to make this wood, a tiny bit more brighter. So when we mix it with our dark wood, it stands out. So let's come here to the RGB curves. I'm going to come to the blue channel, and right now I think it looks a bit purple. So I'm going to pull the blue down here ever so slightly, and you can see that's pushing us to a warmer yellow. Then I'm going to come to this tab, which does the curves for all three colors at once, and I'm going to raise the black value here very slightly and then bring the white value over here. Little bit. And you can see how that's giving us a little bit more of a brighter and warmer wood. And that's the advantage of having this procedural material setup. In fact, let's come back and look at our noise. I'm going to come to this noise setup right here, which was our main streaks, and I'm actually going to change the scale here a bit. Let's come here and change to maybe something like 15. And you can see how we're getting a finer grain wood over our robot. I think this looks nice, and I'm going to move on to adding another material. Let's apply a secondary wood material. I'm going to add a new slot here and tab in the Edit. Going to use the key to select some pieces that we think could be a different color just to add some accents. Now, when I hold the key over here, I want to open the select link menu and make sure this is set to normal. That'll make sure I'm selecting the entire object. I'm going to grab the front of the fore arm here and this forearm over here as well. Then let's come here and grab the bottom of the feet. And then inside of the hip, let's grab these two pieces right here. Now let's assign the secondary slot. We're going to tab back out in the object mode, and we can see that now we have a few accents. Choose a material. In this case, I'd like to use the wooden dark material. And you can see how that's starting to add just a few variations of color. Let's add it in a few more places. I'm going to tab back out in the edit mode here. I'm going to click off to the side there. I'm going to grab our joints here and I'm going to grab the ears, as well, and then I'm going to assign that wooden dark. Let's come back out, and you can see now we have a little bit more color contrast across our character. I zoom in here, I can see that the wooden grain across the ears is going this way. Actually, I think it would look nicer if it was going this way. So let's come over to our wooden dark material. And if you remember, we'll know that this noise texture right here is controlling the wood grain. And the way we stretched it out using the scale here. So if I reset this to one and I instead use the scale, you can see how it now stretches that direction instead. So I'm going to come back over here, reconnect this VSDF node, and now you can see we have the wood grain moving in that direction, and it looks much nicer. Also gives us a contrast and direction just bringing a bit more interest. Now before we move on, I think the head looks like one solid color, and we can maybe add a bit of visual interest by grabbing the bottom of the head here and applying that dark wood. I think that looks nicer. Next, let's look at how to apply our metal material. We're going to click Plus here and create a new slot. We're going to tap into Edit mode, and we're going to decide what pieces we want to apply our metal material to. I'm going to grab the bolts on our leg and our body here, both on the front and the back. Think the ear base here should be metal, as well. So I'm going to grab both of those pieces. And then I want the eyes to be metal, too. So I'm going to grab those eyes and I'm going to click Assign. Now we can see that we have all of our pieces selected, and I think that looks nice. So let's come down here and grab the metal finish. We can see now that we have a nice warm bronze across our character. I have a bit of a golden effect here, and I'd actually like to make that a bit darker. So I'm just going to come over here to the material and drag these down to a little bit of a darker and a warmer color. You can choose whatever color you want. Now, if you remember, we used kind of H mask and a grunge map to create this metal material. But let's alter this so that we can actually make a rubber material. I'd like to apply that to this squishy part of the arm between the forearm and the joint. Let's click A plus symbol here, create a new slot, tab in the edit mode, click off. We'll grab these middle pieces of the arm here and assign that slot. We're going to tab back out to object mode. Going to grab the metal finished here and click new material. Let's rename this Rubber dirty because it's going to be a grungy looking rubber. Now we can just tweak our VSDF here and make it look more like rubber instead of metal. Let's zoom in here. First things first, we're going to turn down the metallic. Next, let's change the colors here. I'm going to click this color here, lower the saturation down on both of these, and then drag it down so that we have a black looking rubber. Now, I don't want this rubber to be so shiny. Now, this is a bit hard to tell a material view, so I'm actually going to hold Z and click Rendered there. You can also click rendered up here as well. Now, right here, this is controlling our roughness. So let's click Shift A search and look for a color ramp. Going to drag that over that line and click. Now I can use this to control the roughness. I'm going to grab the black value here and just raise this. As we raise this towards white, it will become more matte, as you see. And I want a pretty old dry looking rubber, so I'm going to bring this all the way up. And just like that, we've converted our metal material into a usable rubber material. Going to switch back up to material view over here, and next we're going to begin working on the screens. So I'm going to apply a screen here on the center of the body, and then also I'm going to use screens for the eyes. So let's create a new slot. I'm going to tab into Edit mode here, click off and make sure everything is deselected. Grab the screen here, I'm just going to click the Face Selection mode up here and shift click these two faces. But I almost want it to look like the bevel of the screen there is going back in. So I'm going to hit Control plus on my keyboard. What that's going to do is grow that selection until I've selected that entire piece in. I'm going to assign the slot. Let's do the same thing for the eyes. So now we'll switch to a vertex mode. You can see that we have one little center vertex here. So if I grab that on both of these and again, do Control Plus, I can grow that selection. I'm going to grab a few faces there and click Assign. Now I'm going to tap back out in the object mode. Again, let's start with our metal finish. A great procedural shader that we can alter again. Let's click New here and let's call this screens. Let's look at how we can alter this material to work. Again, let's change the color. I'm going to use a black for the screen, so I'm going to bring both of these colors way down with B being all the way black and this being a kind of very, very dark blue. I don't want this to be metallic, so I'm going to turn the metallic down, and I actually want these screens to be shiny, so I'm just going to leave them as is. If you want, you can switch into rendered view and see how that looks. This might be a bit too grungy, actually. So what I'm going to do is grab the bump node here, and I'm going to lower the strength of this down to something like 0.15. And you can see how that removes some of the wear and tear from the screen, giving it a little bit more of a glossy look. Now, there's also the clear coat option. If I come over here to the principal BSDF and go to the coat, we can add a clear coat on top of our entire material. The great thing about this is it gives the appearance of almost a protective screen sitting on top of our screen, which is pretty realistic to how screens are normally made. But I don't want it to be too shiny because I still like this grungy look. So instead, I'm just going to set the weight to something like 0.25, and you can see here how that is now giving us a nice little reflective material on top of our material, but still retaining a lot of the grunge. So now we've applied materials to our characters, but we could still use for some more details. I'd like to add some pupils to the eye, a little battery symbol for our screen, and maybe some additional wear and tear. Let's look at how we can use Blenders Texture Painting tool. 13. Texture Painting Toolset: Video, we're going to dive into the Blender texturing tool set, and we're going to use it to add some grunge and wear and tear to our object and add some expressive details. But I want to call out that the tool set here is actually very simple to use. Really, the primary limitation is going to be your painting skills. Now, this is not a painting class, but I am going to teach you how to use all the tools. And in fact, with what you learn in this class, you could even produce arcane like texture quality with enough practice. Butler's texturing tool unlocks a whole world of creativity and applying textures to your model. So let's dive in and learn how to use them. Let's take a look at the Texture Painting tools in this simple setup. Here, I have a plane with a material on it, and over here, I have a window called the image editor. You can see here I have it set to paint mode, and we can actually paint here if we like, as well. Let's create a new image texture. We can do that here or up here. I'll create the image here, so I'm going to click New. I'm going to type Texture. And here we can set the resolution. For now, I'll leave it at 1:24, which is a one K texture. Here I can choose the color that it's going to use, and I can also set the Alpha here. This will not be active if the Alpha button isn't checked on. You can also choose Ja type, so you can do color grid or UV grid if we've seen in the past, but I'm just going to leave blink, set it to a pure black color, and click New Image. Now we have a black texture. Let's apply it to our object. I'll come up here, hit Shift A, search for an image texture. Then I'm going to drag that into the base color here and select that texture. Now, if I come over here to the UV editor tab into Edit mode, we can see that the UV is just a simple square over our object. But let's look at our painting tools over here in the Viewport. I'm going to drag this over this way, and we're going to tab into Texture Painting mode. You can hold tab and switch to texture paint, or you can come up here Object extra paint. Now, conveniently here at the top, Blender has the most common settings that you'll be using while painting. Over here, you will have the tool menu, which you can open and close with a T button. And over here, if you press the N key, we can click the tool tab, and we'll get a bunch of advanced settings. Let's take a look at some of these basic settings. Here we can choose our color. So I'm going to choose a bright blue and a bright green. And if I paint here, you'll see that it'll paint with the left color. If I press the X key, that will allow me to switch between colors. Is a quick way just to have two colors within your palette. You can access that here or you can access that over here in the color picker. Underneath that, you'll see randomized color. By twirl this down, you'll see that I can adjust things like the hue, the saturation, and the value at random. Now when I paint, you'll see that it'll add a little bit of variety into my paint strokes. Below that, you'll see a color palette. Here you can create a new palette and you can begin saving colors. Just like that, it will save the leftmost color. You can create a custom color palette and return to those colors as needed. We can set the radius of our brush here or up here, and we can set the strength of our brush here or up here. You see the radius will increase the size of the brush and the strength will increase the opacity of the brush. You can also toggle on this option here. If you have a Walcom or drawing tablet, you can use this to use pen pressure to control the radius and the strength. A great keyboard shortcut to remember is that left and right bracket will change the radius. Or if you press F, it will open this little menu where you can click and drag to decide the size of the brush. Now, if you come down here, we'll have the stroke. This is getting a little bit more advanced. Here we can look at the stroke method. This is space. So what it's doing is looking at your brooch, which in this case is a circle, and it is looking at the spacing between those. So if I click and drag here, we get a seemingly straight line. But if I was to increase the spacing here, you would see that it would start to spread out the spacing of those dots. And if I reduce this all the way down to 1%, you can see that there is no space as I drag through. The jitter option here will jitter the position of your brush. So if I turn this up a little bit, you see that as I click and drag, it's jittering along that line. I drag this up more, see how it's starting to spread out more, we can do this all the way into a seemingly spray paint type effect. Now, if you come up here to the stroke method, we've been working in space, which is the default. There's a lot of options here. I'm just going to show you the ones you're most likely to use. Let's take a look at. Line allows us to click and drag lines, and the spacing and the jitter work here as well. Anchored mode allows us to click and drag our brush and leave it in spot. This is great for applying things like logo textures. We'll actually look at how to do this on the robot later. I'm going to reset this to space, and we're going to look at the next option, which is fall off. Fall off here will control the fall off of your brush. In this case, we have a sphere. If I click here, you can see that it is mostly sharp and then starts to blur. Let's look at some of the preset options we can click down here. If I click this here, you can see how our brush starts to have a more gradual fall off. Whereas if I click this here and it's flat all the way across, you can see that we get a hard edged brush. Experiment with this curve here, but I recommend just using the presets. Symmetry allows us to symmetrize across our object. It will work at the origin point of the object. So if I click X here, the origin point of my plane is right here. So if I begin drawing here, it will draw a mirrored image across the origin point. Now, there are some presets. We have paintbrush hard, paintbrush soft, and then most of these are just tools. Honestly, there's not many presets to start. We'll look at how to create some on our own. You can access those bottom down here in the shelf. You can access them up here in the top. Or you can access them over here. Let's take a look at the tools on the left here. We have the blur tool, which will just blur the edges here. You can see how that's beginning to blur the edge. We have the Smear tool, which works just like Photoshop. This is great for blending. We have the Clone stamp tool, and you'll see that the three D cursor has appeared. If you shift right click, you can place that cursor, draw and paint the clone stamp, just like Blender. We also have the fill bucket tool here. Now, it's important to note that when you switch from the paint brush to the fill bucket, it has its own colors. So if I click with the fill bucket here, it will fill the entire object. It is also where you can use a gradient. We click gradient here with the fill bucket, we can click and drag and draw gradients onto our object. Now, down here is a mask option, and this allows you to paint custom mask so you can determine where you can and cannot paint on your character. However, I find it much easier to use the paint mask selection up here. If I click this, you'll notice that my object starts to wash out. And currently, I can't paint anywhere. But if I tab into Edit mode here, I can select the faces that I want to be the mask. So I'm going to click and drag the centerfaces here, going to tab back to the texture paint mode, and now I can only paint within that section. Find this method much easier than using the masking tool. If I want to turn this feature off, I can just click this up here and begin painting anywhere. Let's take a look at the texture here. This allows us to apply a texture to our brush. You can download bony of these for free offline, but I've also included one myself. We will click New here. Let's call this paint brush. Now, if we come over here, we'll see that there is a texture menu, and we can grab the image here. So I have already imported it, but you can open it here. It's included in the class files, and it's called Bush Texture Painting. Take a look at this paint brush texture. We'll see here that it's just a simple brush texture on an Alpha background. Now, below texture, we have texture mask. And the reason I say this isn't super useful is because the texture mask just masks out the texture up here. So, for example, if you put a circle here, it would mask out this texture up here. However, you can build that into your textured image with Alpha. So it's not super useful unless you're doing incredibly advanced brushes. Now, if we click and drag here, you can see how we can begin painting with that texture applied. Right now, though, it's just repeating the texture infinitely and doesn't look all that interesting. Look at how we can change that up. If we come down here, we can actually turn on random. Then we can set the random angle. I'm going to do maybe 90 degrees. If I start to click and drag here, you can see how now it's starting to feel like a paint brush. And if we combine these with some of the other options we've already shared, for example, stroke, we can turn the spacing up ever so slightly, and we can jitter ever so slightly. We can maybe turn on randomized color here. I'm just going to change the value ever so slightly. Now as we begin to click through and drag, you can see how we're getting a much more natural and interesting brush. Now, we've made a few changes. Let's actually save this brush. We'll use it later on our robot character. Let's come up here, click the Down arrow. We can duplicate the asset here. I'm going to choose current file, and I'm going to name this paint brush grunge. Now, if you want, you can play with the textures and the stroke settings until you get something you like. But I'm going to leave mine here. Now, you'll see here it says unsaved. So we just need to make sure that we save our project there, and it should save into our project permanently. Great. Now we have the paint brush grunge brush that we can use as a preset. Now the last thing I want to point out is that when you're done Texture Painting, you need to save your texture image. So under the image editor, you'll see that there's an asterix here. That means that this texture paint has not been saved. Many Blender beginners will spend an hour painting their texture, forget to save the texture, and then lose all of their progress. So before closing Blender, always take a look and see if your image has these asterix. You can come up here, click Image, Save or Save As, and save your Texture Painting image. That way, next time you open Blender, your work will still be there. 14. Painting in Details: Let's take a look at how we can add some details on our robot here. We're going to add some elements to the screens that glow with emission, and we're also going to add a little bit of wear and tear on edges. Let's start with the screens first. So I'm going to grab the object here. I'm going to grab the screen material, and I'm going to come over to the Shader Editor here. I'm going to search and look for an image texture. Go to select that, click New, and set a resolution here. Going to set at something higher like 2048 by 2048. I'm going to name this robot emission. Now an emission Shader works off a black and white image. Everything black will not emit and everything white will emit. So I'm just going to start with a black background. Going to click new image there, and then I'm going to drag this into the emission color here and I'm going to turn the strength up to one. Now, nothing will change because we just flagged black into there, so there's nothing emitting. However, if I were to, for example, make this all white, you'll see that everything is emitting. Let's plug this back in and begin painting on it. We're going to drag this over here, and let's come up here to object mode and grab Texture Painting. Now, if I begin painting in here, you'll see that it is working. And that's because I open texture paint with this image selected. However, you have a lot of images in here, and if you don't have this one selected, when you open it, Blender might try and guess what layer to paint on. So if when you begin to paint, you don't see anything, don't panic. Come up here and we can select a layer we want to paint on. So here we can see that we can see all of our materials, and below that, we can select all the images in those materials. We are on screens, and we want to paint on robot emission. So I'm just going to go ahead and close that there. I'm going to reset back to a black image here. So I'm going to zoom in here and I'm going to address my brush size here. I'm going to use the F key, and I'd like to do two little eye highlights. I'm going to open the fall off here. I don't want a soft fall off like that. I want a harsh fall off to make it look digital. So I'm going to click there, and then I'm going to drag over here and do it on this side, as well. I'm going to move left on my bracket key there, create a smaller highlight, and click there just to put that underneath. And you can see how now we have two little eye highlights. Now, I'd actually encourage you to put something custom here just to make it a little bit more your own. But if you'd like a Paul along with me exactly, we're going to use a battery logo that I have included in the project resources files. We'll come here to Texture. We'll click New. I'm going to name this battery. I'm going to come over here to the texture, and I'm going to open that battery logo that I have included. Like, open image there. And now we're going to twirl this up, come down to stroke, and this is where anchored will come in very useful. Like, click Anchored here and click and drag. You can see how we can get our logo here and just drag this into position, rotating it or just going up and down to change the size. I'm going to set mine to write about that size right there. I'm going to switch back to object mode here and zoom out, and you can see we have some nice little details on our character. I don't really like the bright white emission. I don't like these being bright white, though. I'd actually like to maybe have a yellow emission shade. But if I shift click here, we'll see that we have a black and white image. But we can actually use a color lamp for that. So let's take the color ramp here. We will search for color ramp. I will grab that and put that over here. And we can actually just remap the white here to be yellow. I'm going to click here and maybe make this just a nice warm yellow, just like that. If you have any issues, you can click linear here and go to constant, and then just drag this out a little bit, so it appears and drags over the white. Perfect. That just gets rid of the gradiation in case you have some blurs. So let's make sure that that image is saved. We can do that in two ways. We can come up here to the image editor, grab that robot emission and see it's not fully saved. So we can save that or in texture paint mode, if I come over here. If I click up here at the top, there's an option here to save all modified images. If I just click that, it should automatically save it, and the asterix disappears. Now, you might be wondering why this emission shader just has these random spots here. Well, that's actually going based off our UVs. If I grab the UVs of our character here and switch into UV editor mode, we can see that the UVs here of the eyes are actually appearing where the highlights. So this is another important part of U Vs. It allows us to texture paint properly without accidentally painting onto other islands. Next, let's paint in some wear and tear on the edges of our object here. Now, this gets a tiny bit more complicated. So let's grab our material here, and let's paint in on the wood worm, which is going to be this main one right here. I'm going to come up here to the Shader Editor, and what I want to do is paint into the color and kind of add a bit of wear and tear on the so we could just paint color in manually or we can use it as a mask again. I'm going to vote for a mask. So I'm going to hit Shift D, search and look for image texture here. Go to click New, leave it on black, leave the resolution as before, and I'm going to do grunge edges and click New Image. Now we have a black image, and we're going to use the white to determine the mask of mixing colors. So I'm just going to remove this from the color here and I'm going to search for a mix color. Now I'm going to plug this into the base color here. And just to make this obvious what's happening here, I'm going to make this bright green and this bright blue. We can plug our color into the factor. You'll see that everything black will show A, and everything white will show B. So let's drag the color here into A. This will be our base material. Let's grab all this, and we're going to move this up here. So let's just unplug our color here. And I'm going to drag this here and we're going to create a worn out look. We're just going to search for a hue saturation in value. I'm going to drag that over here. I'm just going to lower the saturation a bit, raise the lightness, and maybe set this to something like 0.51. That's just going to give us a slightly washed out look, which is what generally happens to wood over time. Now we can plug this into the B and we can plug this back into the base color. We'll see our normal color load back here in a moment, and now anything we paint white will make this color come through. Now let's begin Texture Painting. But first, we need to import that brush that we made so we can get a little bit more of an easier grudge to rub across the edge here. I'm going to go to file, append. I'm going to go to the Downloads folder of everything that I have provided. I'm going to find the paintbrush blend. I'm going to go to brush and import paintbrush grub. Now if I grab our object here and I go to the texture paint mode, I need to make sure that I have the correct map selected. So I'm going to grab the woodwarm material, the grunge edges. Go to press the end key to open my tool panel just in case I need it here. And now I'm going to click this brush preset and look for paint brush grunge, which we can see is right here. So I'm going to click that one, now we're ready to begin painting. So I can begin painting here and see that it's starting to add some wear and tear, but it's very subtle. So let's go ahead and amplify that. Let's look at our grunge map edge here. You can see here that we have a nice mask. We just need to make this effect a little bit more extreme. So I'm going to reset this to the full material, and let's adjust the settings here. I'm going to set this to something like maybe 1.5 and the saturation 2.5. There we go. That's looking a little bit better. I might also do 0.525 to yellow it a bit. Now I can begin painting around the edges. This is a great way to add a lot of character. Now, where I recommend kind of painting in these details is around things like edges or where things might be grabbed more often, for example, like bolts. And this can really help add a lot of realism to your object. Now, I'd like to show you one more. You can actually paint into the other maps. Let's take this grunge edge map here and maybe plug it into our bump map. So we will grab the bump map here. Let's take a look at this color ramp we have here. We'll use a mixed color. We can just grab this one up here, duplicate this, grab this on the mixed color. I'm going to change this color to white, and then I'm going to drag this all the way down into the factor down here. That we have white on the bottom, we want to make sure that this is mixed on top. So let's just take a look at what this bump node is looking like, and we can see how that is beginning to paint in. So if we look back at our final material here, we can see that with this bump map, what we're actually doing is painting in some additional bump detail. You could do this on the roughness, the metallic value, or any other value you see fit here. Now I'd like to show you one issue you might run into here. Let's say that I start to paint around the edge of the screen. We'll see that this is also painting on our screen material, which, of course, we do not want. So I'm going to hit Control Z to undo that. We're going to come over here and look at why that's happening. We'll see here that we have woodwarm and grunge edges selected. So why is it also affecting the robot omission? Well, that's because up here, you'll see that the mode is set to material, which will work across materials. So to make it so that we're only painting on that one map, we can come to single image here. And then we will just search for the image that we're painting on currently, which is grunge edges. Now if I come back down here, you'll see that I am only painting on the grunge edges material. Of course, when you're done, make sure to click Save all images to save your changes. Now, in this case, we're using procedural materials, but you could also mix other woods. Now, we opted to use our procedural material setup. But if you look at my final result, you'll notice that it looks a little bit more like realistic. That's because we can do the same exact method, but with the techniques we learned earlier with PBR materials. For example, on this website that I'll be providing in the resources, there's a ton of free wood materials that you can download. For example, you could download this PBR material, put it on your character, and then use the mixed color node to paint in the wear and tear. So feel free to use more stylized procedural materials that we created together or download PBR materials and try and create something unique to your own style. You now have all the skills you need to texture your character. You could use the procedural material setup that we used here. You could include PBR materials. Or if you want, you could start with a completely blank site and paint your character from scratch, creating a more stylized painterly look. Regardless of what direction you take, I'd love to see your results, so please share them. If you'd like to see the final results I have, I'll be including that project file so you can take a look at what I settled on as well. 15. Outro: Congratulations on completing the texturing class. One of the biggest hurdles in three D and one of the most important parts of the production pipeline. Texturing plays an extremely large role in the final result of your three D render and how it will look. I have to say, as somebody with a painting background, it's also one of my favorite parts of the production pipeline being very fun. However, if you're looking to improve your texturing skill sets, I'd say there's one or two pathways moving forward for you. If you're more interested in realism, I would look at Blender shaders in more depth and continue to practice with those in creating procedural materials. If you're interested in taking the PBR workflow, there's a lot of third party tools such as the substance suite that are worth learning to help improve your skill set here. However, if you'd like to take more of the stylized approach, rather than focusing on blenders tools, I would instead focus on your painting skills and trying to up level those as that will play a large role in the final outcome of the shaders you create for your character. Whatever your path may be around texturing, what I do encourage you to do is to continue this course. We're going to go through the process of rigging, animating, and lighting this character, trying to take you from a Blender beginner to a Blender professional by the end of the entire series.