Elevate Your 3D Designs: Lighting and Materials in Blender

1. Introduction: One of the most eye opening moments for me is when I add that first light into the scene and really start to see the different surfaces, see the qualities, see what's happening with that model. It's a really fascinating feeling that I just love doing and it's a great way to add emotion and mood to render everyone. I'm Derek Elliott and I am super passionate about Three D Blender in particular. I've been using it for a very long time to create product animations, investment seeking presentations. And I also am so passionate about it that I like to teach it to people. If you're interested in ever getting freelance work or getting your work featured on a forum like art station or hands, then having really good lighting and really good materials are going to be a key path to getting you there. Materials can also be particularly intimidating where maybe you've seen a hyper realistic material and you might think someone spent hours creating it. When realistically, they just added a few image textures. We're going to cover a lot of topics today. In particular, just to name a few. We're going to learn about HDRI lighting. We're going to learn how to rotate HDRI. We're going to learn about area lights, controlling the spread of those lights. We're going to play with the color of lights. We're also going to play with materials. We're going to learn about making metal materials. We're also going to learn about transmissive, how you can make glass objects. We're also going to learn about subsurface scattering, how you can make skin like materials and rubbers. And as always, we'll wrap things up with my preferred blender settings. The way I like to set up my renders for professional results that don't take too much time. Lighting materials is something that is very exciting to me. I'm super passionate about it. Thanks for deciding to take this class. Let's get started. 2. Discover Lighting Tools: So welcome to the class on lighting in materials. As usually, you don't need much to get started. But of course, make sure you have a recent version of Blender downloaded. Make sure you've got a keyboard and a mouse, and besides that you don't need too much else. Consider having maybe an object in your scene that you're ready to do some lighting, because that's what we're going to dive right into today. I'm going to split my view by clicking up here and just dragging this over. And then I want this view on this side to be a rendered view. Even though we don't have any lights in our scene, you might be wondering why we can see the model at all. Because if you don't have any light in your scene, you shouldn't really be able to see anything. And that's because also by default and blender, we have this world setting right here. The world is set to this gray color and the strength is set to one. We could either turn that to a black value, or we could turn the strength down to zero. The way I normally add lights into the scene is by pressing shift A. And then we have a menu here. And you might be guessing will work in the light tab. And you're exactly right. So we have several different types of lights. The first of which I'll show you is a point light. If we drag that light up and just put that above our object, we'll see that the point light is casting light down onto our object. And if we move it around our object, we'll see this casting light in every direction. One thing I see a lot in beginner renders is that things are just very dark. And I always joke that you don't have to pay for the electricity when you're rendering a blender. Crank those lights up super high, make sure you can see your object. So I'm just going to add in another light, and this is probably my favorite type of light, and that's the area light. And that's a really easy light, to just cast light in a single direction. So if you remember the point light, that's creating a sphere of light going out in all directions. The area light, it's just going in one direction. Now if we did have a plane in our scene, for example, then we're still casting a little bit of light onto that plane, which then would be reflected up onto our object. I wanted to move on and talk about another really cool way to light scenes, and that's using this sky texture. I need to pull that back up to a value greater than zero. The sky texture is really one of my favorite ways to light scenes, and I use this all the time nowadays. As soon as this feature came into blender, I was using it nonstop. Playing with the elevation there will give you the right angle you want and then the rotation is going to do about what you think. That's just going to move that sun around our object. You can get the shadow facing the direction that you want it to. There's a lot of science that probably goes into these that I'm not totally familiar with and I want to remind you that you don't need to know exactly what's happening. My style of working in blender is really just playing with the sliders, seeing what happens. And that's what you'd want to do here. I'm actually going to bring the strength of this world down to zero. And then let's look over here in our regular viewport. You could add, for example, a, let's just add a circle object into our scene. Let's maybe move this up and then add a skin modifier to it to give it a little bit of thickness. We can use control to control the size of that. Now this is actually a material based way to light things in the material settings. I can click New Added Material, and we want to change this from a principled shader to an emission shader right there. And now you can see that this mesh is actually glowing. So there's actually light coming off of this mesh. One of my old favorites, I don't use it so much anymore, but if you're a beginner, it's a really great way to bring realistic light into your scene. And that's by using an HDRI. Hdri stands for High Dynamic Range image. You can see that we have a little bit of light in the scene and if you've ever played with maybe adding a metallic material, let's turn the metal up all the way to one roughest down. You'll see that we have some really interesting reflections happening here. Blender by default comes with a few in here. Let me show you. If you did want to actually render an HDRI, you can do that in the rendered view here. Then you would just need to go into your world settings and then instead of using this nita sky texture, I'm going to add a HDRI image. If we go to environment texture, then you'd see your world turns pink. If you see something that's pink, it usually means that the image texture is missing. And that's exactly what the case is here. We have an option here to now navigate to an environment texture. So you might already have a folder full of HDRIs that you just didn't know how to use yet. But if you don't have one, then you can come to this website, Poly Haven. They've got HDRIs, textures and models, but what I'm looking for today is an HDRI. These are all totally free, super high resolution. Once that's downloaded, let's open back up Blender. Let's hit open right here. And then find where you have that saved and then double click on it. Now you can see we have a full world basically around our object. It's just got a lot of color information that helps you get a realistic lighting. As you can see here, if you want to rotate this HDR around, that's something that you can do in the node editor up here at the top. I'm going to go into my shader editor. I need to add a few nodes, but I'm going to change this from object to world. And that'll actually show the nodes that's building up this world. There's an add on that we'll use a lot later that we'll go ahead and install. Now called the node Angular add on scope here in to edit preferences, and then under add ons we'll search for that one. Again, it's called the node wranglar. If we just enable that with this EXR selected, I'm going to press control, and that's going to add in a texture coordinate node and a mapping node to rotate the image. We're just going to change this Z value. That's something that is a difficult thing. Sometimes you bring in an HER and you want to be looking at a certain part of the background and rotating it is a little bit confusing, but this is exactly how you do it. In this lesson, I've showed you some of the most basic types of lights and we really covered most of them. So I usually work with things like area lights, but we also covered working with the sky texture to bring realistic skies into your scenes. And we also showed you how to add an HDR image so that you can have a sort of sky dome texture. If you're really interested in getting unique reflections on things like metal objects, meet me in the next lesson where I'm going to show you how to use lighting to highlight certain details of an object or to set a mood in your scene. 3. Learn How to Use Light: This lesson is a little bit more about the theory of lighting. And how we can use lighting to set a mood or draw attention to certain parts of our object in this scene, I have a simple earbud model that I used in a recent freelance project. And I think it'll be a really good example to start talking about how we can set the mood with lighting and some other techniques we can do to start illuminating objects. So I'm going to press Shift A and add in an area light. And bring in that area light behind the object. I want to create a rim light. Now if we spin our viewpoint around here, this is a little bit of a less attractive angle just having that light blasting the back of the object, but it does look really nice from the front. Something to definitely consider when you're doing lighting, especially when you're really concerned of what parts you're seeing, is to know where you're actually going to be looking, to know where I'm going to be looking. I'm going to add in a camera to my scam. Let's just bring that back a little bit. Then in my sidebar here, I'll just get this squared off so that it's looking straight ahead. And then we'll view it in our camera view over here. Now pay attention to the power of the light here. You don't want to go too high because then these edges might start to get blown out a little bit too much. But obviously you don't want to go too low because then you're back to your plane world. Usually when I'm doing this rim lighting technique, I like to bring that size down quite a bit, just till it's about the size of our object and it's just gracing the top and sides of it right there. This is a really cool technique. The next step I'll usually do is by adding in another area light. And I'll just do that by duplicating the object. Now when I'm doing lighting, the second light I usually add is one that goes just right above the object. This is starting to give a little bit more context. We can see that this is the right tear bud and maybe we even tilt this down a little bit. That we have a similar effect to what we had with the rim light, but we have a little bit more light on the front of the object as well. You don't want to have so much darkness that you can't see what's going on in the object. Even though I have a really nice silhouette here, I'm lacking some of the detail in this lower area. The way I'd usually add that is by adding in another light. Now we start to really see the form of this object. And we're actually getting a little bit of information about the materials too. We can see that this is a rubbery texture here in the front. And then this is maybe more of a metal type texture if we put it at that angle, For example. Our lighting set up is still working pretty well, but now we have a little bit of interest on the bottom of the model that we might be interested in seeing. We're not as interested in what's going on right here. We might take this same light and just move that a little bit below our object just till we have a little bit of light coming onto the object there. Now we can actually use shader editor techniques on our lights, in our light settings. If we go to use nodes, we'll then see the nodes for that light right here. The reason we're doing it here, rather than just adding a color, is because we want to be able to control a more realistic color temperature for our lights. So I'm going to press Shift and add in a converter, and that's going to be called a black body. For a warm light, I might like to use something like a 3,500 And then for a cool light, you might want to use something much higher. Maybe we want a little bit of a warmth on the bottom of our light here. And then maybe at the top we want a cool light To make this render feel a little bit more dynamic. I'm going to use nodes here. And then I'm just going to copy that node from this other light pressing control C. And then I'll paste it onto this control V. We can put that into the color right there. Now I can change this color to a much higher value, maybe like a 7,500 and we have a really nice, cool lighting. Now there's a really easy way to totally mess up a render, and that's by having too much light on the front of your object. You're always going to be way better having light either to your side of your object, like something like this is looking much better, even the other side looking okay. And in general, I like to move the light just a little bit behind the object as well. Now another thing I wanted to touch on was highlighting a particular part of the object. Now usually when I'm doing that, I don't want to light on the entire object, so I'm going to delete these other lights right here. Now the light is going everywhere and I don't want that, but I wanted to focus more so on a particular place. Rather than just bringing the size down and trying to position the light really close to that object. We have another really cool command on the area lights, which again my favorite lights which is the spread. I'll add a little plane object underneath here just so you can see exactly what that's doing. But once you bring that down to a lower value, we're going to have more of a spot light effect. Then we can also change the shape of this light movie from a square to a rectangle. Let's just rotate that at a cool angle. We can bring the size of that down quite a bit because we really just want to highlight that one particular area. Lighting is a really advanced topic. There's a lot of room to play around, and I encourage you to do just that. Take an object, bring it into your scene, add a few lights. Start with just one light, moving it around. Seeing what kinds of shapes you can create. See if you can find some interesting shadows on your object. And just start with that. Then start bringing in light slowly until you feel like you have a really nice looking object. This is going to take a lot of practice, but I will say one of the biggest steps is use as few lights as possible. Most of the times I'm doing product, animation product lighting, I'm really only using two or three lights of Max. Now that we've covered the important topic of lighting, meet me in the next lesson or we'll go into material settings. 4. Understand Material Basics: So in this lesson, we're going to be walking through some of the basics of setting up materials using the principal Chador end blender. I'll walk you through how to control color, roughness, metalness, and even transmission to create things like glass and materials. We'll also cover subsurface scattering to create more rubbery and skin type materials. I've got a statue model here that we used previously in this class, and I'm going to use that as a basis for setting up some materials. I will get my Viewport set up again so that we can see what they look like in the rendered view. So let's move this into a rendered view and then I will make sure that I'm rendering in the cycles render engine. Some of these materials don't work so well on EV, particularly transmissive materials. So we'll use the cycles render engine, make sure your GPU is selected if you're going to be using that. Now let me just get a little bit of a lighting set up so that we can actually see the materials we're working with, similar to what we did in the last lesson. I'm just going to add in an area light over here. Let's just bring that down a little bit. Honestly, something just like that should be plenty for us. Maybe we just drop the power tad. When you're setting up materials, it's important to have a relatively known lighting set up. So you don't want lighting coming from too many different directions because then the lighting could have an effect on the material that you maybe weren't thinking about so much. When you're working with materials, it's good to just have maybe a single light source so that you can see this part of your object is fully lit and this is not. I'm going to change this from a three D Viewport to a shader editor. And if you remember from way earlier, anytime you see an underlined thing like this in Blender, that usually means that that's the hot key. Once that menu is open, when I'm switching to a shader editor, I'll usually just click up here and hit S. And that will change us to a shader editor with this statue selected. I want to press new to add a material. And by default and Blender, the new materials are going to be created using the principled BS DF shader. The first control is color. That should be pretty self explanatory. That's just going to change the color of our object. We'll just set that to whatever we want for now. We'll probably change it a few times throughout this lesson. Roughness, if you bring that down to zero, that's going to be less rough. Closer to zero is going to be less rough, AKA shiny. And bringing that up closer to a value of one is going to be more rough, AKA less shiny. Now we have a rough material and a shiny material. You're going to be using roughness quite a bit to control the way your material looks. Now the next slide I wanted to talk about was the metallic value. If we dry that all the way up to one, you'll see that we're starting to look like a much more metallic gold type material. If we drag this down to zero, we're back where we started again. Usually you want this to be either at zero or one. Now another tip for working with metal materials. I like to use values that are not too saturated, especially if you're trying to make a golden look like that. I'll also turn this world strength down to zero, so we're not getting that gray background. Let's turn our overlays back on. And I'm going to duplicate the lamp we have on the side over here. Let's put shift to duplicate that. Let's just bring that over here so that we have a little bit better view of our materials. That's looking pretty good. I can turn my overlays back off if you're working with a metal material, Turn that up to one, Otherwise, turn it to zero. Now if you're doing stylized work, it's okay to work somewhere in the middle there. But just know that that's not usually a realistic approach. The next slider I wanted to talk about was transmission. This one's really fun. And again, this only really works great in cycles. So make sure you're rendering in cycles if you're going to be doing work much with transmission. If we turn the transmission value up all the way to one, you'll see we start to get a glassy material. And that's because light is now allowed to transmit through the object. Now, along the same lines with the color of transmissive materials, usually want this value to be all the way up to one. And saturation goes a long way with glassy materials. If we turn this to, let's say like a blue material and the saturation is one, it's very blue. But sometimes if you're going from more of like a tinted glass, you might consider turning this down a lot lower. Just so we have a little bit of a hint of that blue color there. Now another thing to know is that if you're working with metal materials, if this metallic value is set to one, the transmission value will not work. If things are looking a little weird, maybe as you're moving through the lesson, you had this metallic value at one. Just make sure you pull that back down to zero before you start working with transmissive materials. Now, beyond the color, roughness has a lot to do with the appearance of transmissive materials too. If we bring the roughness value up a little bit, you can see we have a cloudy, frosted glass look, which is really nice. Playing with the roughness value can affect the look of transmissive materials quite a bit. Now let's bring this back down to zero, so we have a nice shiny glass Again, we do also have a value called transmission roughness. We can bring that up a little bit, that you can see we saw a shiny object on the outside where we've got these sharp reflections from our lamp. But on the inside the light is becoming a little bit more diffused. That's another fun look that you can play with. Now she value if we turn this to maybe a black material, so that's nice and dark. The sheen value is going to add almost like a little bit of a microscopic fuzz to our object. Right now, this feels like a plastic or something like that. But if we were to turn the sheen value up to one, you're not going to see much change. You can see a little bit happening on the rim here, but you can also type in values higher than one. If we really see this effect, type into value like a 60, you can see now this almost feels like a velvety soft type object. 60 would probably be way further than you want to go. But just another example of how in blender, just play with the sliders, move things up and down, slide them around, see what they look like. See what they do. Type in crazy values, just till you get a better understanding of what that value is doing. So I'm going to turn the sheet back down to zero and talk about the next one which is clear coat. Clear coat is basically like a second roughness value is how I like to look at it. If we had, let's say this was a metallic material, maybe we were trying to create a car paint or something like that. You might be interested in having a metallic car paint. That is, you'd think it wants to be really shiny, but that doesn't look right. But car paint looks a little bit more like that. But you still want to get those sharp reflections. That's where clear coat comes in. If you bring this clear coat value up to one, you can see that we'll have a second control over the roughness here. Right now it's a to 0.03 which is very low value. So we have a really sharp reflection on the side of the face right here. But we also have the underlying higher roughness value, this 0.391 So those are working together is a great way to create an easy car paint type material. Now the last one we're going to talk about today is subsurface. I'm going to bring this metallic value down to zero. I'll also bring the clear coat down and I'll just make this a nice white material so that we have something basic to work with. Now, subsurface is going to control what's happening as light penetrates your object, it bounces around a little bit in there. If we start to drag the subsurface value up, you'll see what that does. This is a really good way to create waxy type materials or skins. In particular, if you're working on a character and maybe you see a light behind their ear, you might see a little bit of light shining through their ear. This is a great place where you'd want to use subsurface materials. Anything waxes, plastics, rubber, things like that. Those are all great use cases for subsurface. Now, you can control this value as much as you want. Usually you want to leave it pretty low. But this does depend a little bit on the scale of your object. The values we covered here are most of the ones I'm normally using. I usually don't use some of these other ones. The index of refraction is something we can talk about real briefly. That's just what happens to light as it transmits through the object. If you're working with a super realistic glassy material, certain glasses and plastics have different index of refraction. And that's what this IOR value is. Sometimes you might want to control that if you're working on a super realistic material. There's lists you can find online of index of refraction. So there you have it. With the principal chatter, we can really create a lot of realistic materials. We have great control over things like the metallic value, the transmission, even subsurface, to let light kind of come into our object. And with these tools and sliders, we can create so many materials. I encourage you now to walk around, find some other materials, pick up objects, see what they look like, and see if maybe you can create those in blender using some of the techniques we covered in this lesson. Join me in the next lesson where we're going to be doing some procedural texturing. This is where we can start to add surface level, microscopic detail to our materials that we've created in the lesson today. And add that extra level of polish to create new and exciting effects. 5. Use Procedural Textures: So in this lesson, we're going to learn a little bit about procedural textures. Procedural textures are one of my favorite ways of texturing objects because they're pretty simple to work with and you don't need to work with any image textures, download large image files or anything like that. Procedural textures are mathematically divined. They're all built into blender and there's a lot of different patterns we can work with right off the Dat to add extra levels of detail to your basic shaders that you're creating with the principal had. Okay, so we're going to start off by doing some texturing on this chair object. So right now it has a pretty basic kind of glossy material, sort of resembling leather. But we're going to try to move that texture to the next level and prove it a little bit with some procedural textures. So the first thing I'd like to do is just get my viewport working a little bit better for me. So I'm going to drag up a new window right here and I'm going to change that to a shader editor. As you might have noticed in the previous lesson, I like to use mostly the shader editor to do my material editing. You, of course, can do it down here in the bottom right, so I'll per shift A and add in a texture, and I'll use a Voronoi texture. Now, this might be a word you've heard before, a Voronoi texture basically is kind of, looks like little bubbles, but we'll see that in just a minute here. I'm going to do a couple commands here that we need to make sure we have the node Angular add on enabled. Now, we did turn that on in a previous lesson, but in your preferences, just make sure you go up into add ons. And if you don't have it enabled, which I don't right now, I'll click that right there and make sure it's enabled. The node Angular add on just adds in a few hand hoc keys to sort of see what we're doing a little bit easier. One of those is being able to shift control and left click on any texture, any image shader anywhere in the shader editor and preview it so that we can see exactly what's happening on our object. This is what the Voronoi texture looks like. We basically got black and white values creating this bubble like pattern. And this is going to be great for faking a leather texture with the texture selected. We're going to press control, and that's going to add in our mapping node which also has a texture coordinate node attached to it. The generated input works fine here. If you were working with UV's, you could plug that in. And you can see that since this model has not been UV unwrapped, we have some of that stretching going on with procedural textures, I actually usually like to use the object input, so with that in the right place, these should all be looking consistent. We shouldn't have any stretching going on. I can bring this scale up to something that I think might look right, but I'll really be able to see how that looks Once I actually plug it into the normal value. I'm going to right click and holding control, drag across that to cut that input. Now we don't have anything going in anywhere. I'll hook this back up right there, and now we're back at our basic texture. But if I take this Voronoi distance and plug that into the normal, we'll see that something started to happen, but it's not looking quite right. When we're working textures, we need to actually add in another node, soft shift a and add a vector bump. I'll just drop that right there. And then this distance value needs to be going into the height. We're going to drag this distance value to something very low. Maybe something as low as a value, we might have to type in like a 0.01 You can see that now we have the bumpiness going on, but it doesn't look like it's going in. Instead of out and out is the way we want to go. There's a handy bun right here to invert that. Now let's also bring this strength down a little bit, just until it's looking a lot more subtle. Something like that is looking good. Now that we have this bump texture on here, we don't need it to be maybe quite so shiny. Let's pull that up to a value that looks just a little bit softer. Let's move on now to adding similar techniques to our floor and walls for doing floors. I usually like to use a musgrave texture. It's similar to a noise texture but just has a little bit of a different pattern. And then I'm going to do the same thing I did before by pressing Shift to add in a texture and I'll use a musgrave texture, we'll drag this into the height, and then remember to put between that our vector bump node, make sure that that's also plugged into the height. And now you can see we have this wavy looking floor. Now, I don't want it to be quite that wavy. If you're doing something stylized or fantasy, maybe you do want to go with something like that. But it's way too much for me. So before I go much further, press control here and make sure I'm using the object input again. So now we have a subtle bump on the floor there. Still a little bit too much. So I'll bring this distance way down to maybe 0.01 and then we'll also bring the strength down a little bit. We have just a little bit of waving ness there and it might be a little bit too much. So let's bring this scale down just a tad, until it's looking a little bit more natural. Now, we can do the same thing on the walls here, and I'm a big fan of a plastery looking wall. So let's find a nice place where we've got some light to look at, and let's add in a noise texture for the wall. This is probably the one I use the most. Let's press shift at a texture, and that's going to be a noise texture. Let's drop this into the factor, into the normal, and then add in our bump again and plug that into the height, and we can remove that input and then control to make sure this is also mapped with the object. Now the noise texture has a little bit more options on it. Scale is obviously controlling how big that is, but we also have a little control over the detail. That's some finer level detail within the texture and then the roughness value too. We also have a distortion control here which sometimes I like to use. I use the same texture if I'm doing like, maybe like a molded plastic or something like that. This is a nice plaster look here. It's maybe a little bit too extreme though. Let's bring down again the distance quite a bit, and then we'll also bring the strength down a little bit. When you're working with procedural textures, you definitely need to consider how far away from your object you're going to be when you're using them. Again, this is going to be something that maybe you don't notice exactly right when you look at the image. But when you're looking for those details, people are looking for your render. Seeing if you're a beginner or advance, they're going to be looking at things like your textures and if you took the time to add those small details. So I wanted to show you how you could also use this normal input with an image texture to add a little bit of texture to that. This painting image here is obviously putting out a lot of different colors. But we can just take those colors and plug them into the normal input here. And then using our same vector bump node, plugging this into the, we can start to get a little height information just purely from that color. So it's not actually taking color information, but it's converting that to black and white. So this is a cool way to make your painting look like. Maybe it's actually got some brush strokes on it without too much work. Now, one other texture we could do really quickly would be for fabrics, in particular called the magic texture. So we'll go texture and we'll add in a magic texture, and then we'll have this factor go into the alpha instead of the normal. So if I shift control and left click on that magic texture, you can see what that looks like. It actually does output color data, But if we shift control and left click on it again, move down to the factor. You can see that the factor is outputting a black and white information. So if we press control on this, do the same object input and change our scale up, we can create a nice fabric texture there. So if you plug this factor in, you can see that now we have that range of values creating that effect rather than just the whole thing being transparent or not transparent. We could also even use this factor to pull into the normal and then add in our same vector bump node to create a little bit of height variation there. If you get up close, that's something that might look nice. Don't be afraid to adjust the size of the texture for different renders. Maybe if you get in up close, you can bring the scale up a little bit. Or if you're further out, bring it down so that that texture appears a little bit bigger and is more noticeable in your render. So feel free to play around a little bit. There's a lot that procedural textures can do. I mean, you notice that I only covered a few of the sliders and I only plug them into a few places on the principal chatter. But there's a lot of things you can do with procedural textures. I encourage you, just like with normal materials, look for other materials in the real world, Find textures that you think are interesting, try recreating them and blender. See what you can do with some of the different sliders and values on each texture. Plugging them into the alpha values, the normal values. And you can also use these procedural textures to control things like roughness, metalness, and color of course as well. Meet me in the next lesson where we're going to cover another way to texture objects that you might be more familiar with, and that's by using image textures. 6. Utilize Image Textures: Welcome back to this lesson. We're going to cover image textures in this one. And that's a little bit different than procedural textures because image textures need a UV map. We're going to do that on our chair object to add some wood texture. We're also going to show you how you can use a black and white texture that you might have created to add spot gloss to an object. And we'll also take a look at downloading a really nice image texture from the Internet and how that can make a really spectacular, realistic texture for your objects. So the main difference between image textures and procedural textures are that rather than using sort of a mathematically defined texture, we're actually using an image file that is the texture. And the other big difference is that rather than using our object input like we did before, we need to have a UV map. Think about an image texture as like a foil wrapped around a candy or something like that. We need to start with a flat image and sort of wrap that around the model. And that process is called UV unwrapping, which will cover a little bit in this lesson. In this scene here I have a simple bottle model that I have. It's like a little bit of a cosmetics squirt bottle. To add an image texture, we can just start with our regular principled BSF shader, and then we can press control to add in a texture. And if you remember, if you followed along with the HDRI lesson, When we added the HDRI, it turned pink because we were missing the texture. And that's the same case here. So I'm going to open up where I have a texture saved and I've got that one called Skin Care one. And that's just a little bit of a label. Now, I'm not seeing the label on the object, and that's because it does need a UV input. But we don't actually have a UV match to the object in our data down here. We do have a UV map, but there's no actual UV information. So I'm going to open up a new window and we'll make that a UV editor. So if I tabs to go into edit mode for example, and then let's press L to select this bottle object and I did smart UV project press. Okay. It would kind of take a guess at how you want the textures to be mapped around that object. And we can see that what it's done up here is sort of unwrapped this large area here. It's taken some guesses about how we want the top to be unwrapped, but it's not looking quite right. So in this instance, I actually want to define exactly how this gets unwrapped. So what I want to do is manually add some seams and unwrap this texture. So if this is the front of my object right here and I want the Dirk Elite skin care label to be right there on the front tab to go into edit mode. And then I just wanted to be in this middle front area here, so I'm going to use Alt and left click to select that ring there. And then I'm going to press control and mark a seam. So that's basically a line where Bunder will cut on this model to basically unwrap that texture. So I'm going to add in another seam on the bottom right here, Press control and Mark Sam, I'm just going to press A to select everything and then press U and Unwrap. It's going to have a tricky time unwrapping the areas that I did not add seams for. If you don't have any seams on your model, it's not going to unwrap it properly. I'm just going to take all these islands here by selecting them up here, move them to a white area on my mesh. Because I just wanted to show you a little bit about how we can unwrap these things. If I rotate this, I'll notice that for one it's backwards. Let's press X. And just holding control, I'm going to scale that by negative one. And then we'll scale that up just until it's in place. Now if you want to actually see the textures in this view as well, you can do that by hitting this drop down here and then clicking Texture. Then we'll also display whatever texture you have selected right here in the viewport. Now we can use this image texture to control whatever we want. For example, we could plug that into the roughness value. If we move these lights around, you can see that now we have a roughness effect happening where we have the spot gloss, where the image is controlling what areas are rough and what areas are shiny. We could also, of course, plug this into something like the normal input here and we could add in our bump node. And then we have a nice spot gloss effect where this is bumped out and you might want to pull the strength down a little bit and it's bumped out and it's shiny. So we have this one image texture controlling what's happening on the object there. And you could even have it control the color. If we plug this into the color, of course, at first that's going to be black and white. But if I wanted to, I could remap those colors so we could add a color mix color. And then now instead of having it be black and white, we could have that black and white value control the factor. The way this mixed color node works is that basically if we had two colors here, like let's say this one was a red and this one was a blue, then if the factor was zero, it would be the first color. If it was one, it would be the second color. Remembering again that black is a value of zero and white is a value of one. If we plug those in, it's going to properly mix those colors exactly how we'd expected. So I'm going to return to my room scene here and do a little bit of UV unwrapping on our chair object to map a wood texture to the wood parts of the chair over here is where we want to start unwrapping this object. So right now if we tap into edit mode, we have a lot of modifiers on here. So what I want to do is first kind of get access to the raw mesh here. So rather than having all these modifiers, I actually have the mesh object. So what I'm going to do is first of all, create duplicates of these objects. In case I need to go back, I want to press Shift D and then I'm going to move those to our trash collection, which we used earlier. And a lot of times I just use that trash collection disabled as a way to kind of hold things that I might need to go back to. If I now start applying some of these modifiers, we'll press control A to apply that control. A to apply the subdivision surface control A to apply the solidify and control A again, to apply the subdivision. You can see that now we have access to that raw mesh which is where we want to be when we start doing our UV unwrapping. Let's do the same thing on this object. What I want to do is actually add in an image texture here. And the way I'll do that is by pressing control, and then let's navigate to where we have a wood texture saved. But I do want to go ahead and do some unwrapping here. Let's just make sure that we have, for example, on these bottom pieces down here. Let's press control and mark a seam around the outside there. Think about it. If you were wrapping this in fabric, you'd want to have the seams in natural positions where you could unroll it and you'd have a flat image. So we actually need to add a few more seams. Let's add the seams for this part right here and this we'll do control and mark seam. And then let's just see if we can go ahead and press A to select everything and then and unwrap it. If we take a look out there, it is looking pretty good, not too much stretching. And now we have that mapped very nicely. And we can do the same thing on this object here and add some more seams right here, mark those seams. Now we can press U and unwrap and we have some very nice looking, very straight UV's. We would just want to make sure that our texture is of course running the correct direction and it looks like it is going up and down again. We can add that texture into the viewport by using this, and that would be a good place to analyze if your textures are being mapped the way you want. There might be one more place you'd be interested in adding a wood texture, and that would be right here on this object. And cubes and rectangular shaped objects get unwrapped really easily with just the default settings. And let's apply our Solidify modifier as well as our array modifier. And I'm just going to press and smart UV project. That should do a pretty good job right off the bat. So if I bring up my UV image editor, you can see that that's working great. You don't really want the texture to look the same on two objects. That's a dead giveaway. Anytime I'm looking at someone's three renders, it's a good idea when you're working with duplicated objects, to have a little bit of control over how the texture is being mapped across different objects. Now we have our wood texture on both the shelves and the chair object, so let's press control S to make sure this file has been saved. And let's move into one more way that you can do image texturing using a much more advanced texture that you might have downloaded from the internet. So I'm going to add in a plane instead of our cube there. And we can actually just leave this point line and use that as our example. But we can delete the camera as we can see in the rendered view. It's just there's no material. So I'm going to press new and add a new material and we'll call that super texture. The first step, again with adding image textures. Again, make sure you have the node regular add on enabled is pressing control. That's just again, so that we get the image texture that we can put something into. We've got the mapping texture and we've got this texture coordinate, which in this case we do want to be the UV texture. Now let's change our render engine to cycles, so I'm going to navigate to where I have this texture saved, and that is the rustic stone wall, Four K. Let's go ahead and open some of these textures here. This one is the diffuse texture, that's where we'll be plugging in the color input. We've got some other textures here that we don't need complete control over. This one is the normal texture. I would say that besides the color and maybe the roughness, the normal is maybe the next most important one. But let's just go and start by plugging in this diffuse texture. Let's double click that here. Now you can see we have the texture nicely mapped onto our objects. So it's just this nice stone texture. The next texture I want to add is going to be the roughness texture. Let's press Shift. Do you duplicate this texture? Let's just open this back up, then let's pick the roughness texture. The roughness texture again, remember roughness goes 0-10 being not rough, one being very rough, black being zero, white being one. Sometimes you'll see roughness called glossiness. And it might look dark when you expected it to be light. But that's just because different softwares work different way. And depending on where you download your textures from, it might look a little bit different. So we can plug this color value into the roughness right here. And now you can see we're starting to get a little bit of variation with the roughness where certain areas are rougher than others and we get a lot more kind of realism happening here. Usually with textures like this, you can change from the color space from SRGB to non color. For most textures that are not using color information, which is basically anything besides this one, you'd want to switch that to non color data. Now the next one I wanted to mention was the normal. As I said, I think that's the next most important after color and roughness. So I'm just going to duplicate my texture one more time, and then I'll open up the normal. Now if we take this and plug this into the normal input, we'll see again something is happening, but nothing too spectacular. And that's because we need to add in our normal map node. If we plug that into the color and then make sure that this is set to non color data, you'll see that now this is really starting to look pretty realistic and we can control the strength here with this value. So now we have a pretty wild looking texture. This reacts to light and everything like that. Even though this is still just a single plane, there's nothing else in there. There's no geometry done, any modeling, we didn't model these parts, but just with those three textures alone, we have a really realistic looking texture. The last texture we're going to add is the displacement texture. So let's just duplicate our texture one more time and open up that file. We can plug this instead into the displacement input. Right here, I subdivided the mesh by right clicking and clicking subdivide. And then I added some more subdivision using this simple subdivision method. Because we need to actually change the shape of our object rather than just work with a single plane like we did before, search for displacement. Drop that in right there, and then we can plug this into the height. Now if you're not seeing in your viewport, that may be because in the material settings down here, by default you might just be seeing your bump only, which is what we're getting with our normal map. But if you change this to displacement and bump, then it's going to also render the displacement. So now you can see we have a super realistic looking sort of wall texture. We could right click and shade this smooth. We haven't done any modeling here or anything, we've just downloaded these textures. And I'm not going too heavy with the amount of images in my file. Meet me in the next lesson where we're going to render this all out, tie it all together, and have a nice image with all those textures in one place. So we can really see what kind of improvement we get when we add all those extra textures into our scene that we didn't have before. 7. Explore Render Settings: In this lesson, we're going to pull together all those image textures and procedural textures that we created into our room scene. Make sure that they're all looking just the way we like. Set up a new render, maybe from a different angle. We'll look at adding another camera into our scene and play a little bit around with the depth of field and use some composition guides in the viewport so that we can get our shot framed nicely. To add another camera, I'm just going to duplicate this one I have now and then to be sure you're looking through that camera. Instead, you can hit Control and Numpad zero. There's also an option to do that in the menu up here. With that as my new active camera, I'm going to go into the camera view. Sort of find a unique place that maybe we can view our scene from. That just feels like a little bit more interesting. And one thing we can do to sort of see how this shot is actually framed up is using some common guides like the Rule of Thirds, I can click right here. And then under composition guides I could turn on thirds, which will make some lines here, right in my view for it. Or I can kind of frame this up and take a little bit of a look at kind of how that might look. Now, the Rule of Thirds is sort of a common tool in photography for placing objects kind of within your frame and just finding something that might look sort of interesting. This might be one angle you're interested in rendering. But maybe we change what we're focusing on from the chair cushion to our pool object. So this could be sort of a fun way to indicate that like oh, there's a lounge over here with the pool. We can maybe come in here and take a real closer look at a view that might show our painting and our chair and also shows our floor texture a little bit nicer. Again, just checking your composition guides, kind of framing the shot in a way that just creates sort of an interesting topic. Placing things sort of around these corners of the third guide. Now the last thing I wanted to show you was that sometimes your images might look a little bit flat and you can go into the rendering settings. And then down under color management, we have some look transforms. So we can change the look from none, which is set to now, to something like very high contrast. Some people might think it's a little bit overkill my work. I tend to use a lot of contrast. I just like the way it looks, but that's something to play with. Now just to wrap things up, we'll go over some of our typical render settings that we usually have been using. Right here is we're setting the resolution, and then down here we can select what type of file we want to output. So sometimes for just a quick render, I'll use a Jpeg because the file is much smaller. But a PNG is going to look a little bit nicer. Now beyond that and the actual rendering settings, again, make sure you're using your GPU to render if you have one, and then for samples if you're using denoising, then something like 600 should be totally fine for your final render. You can even try bringing it down lower. The last thing let's do is just maybe set a new depth of field around this chair object rather than just clicking on the chair object. I actually want to have a little bit more fine tune control over where we're focusing. So I'm going to press Shift A and add in an empty to my scene. And I'll just make that a sphere. And then I can make that a little bit smaller. And let's press F two and rename that to Focus. Now what we can do is just move this to wherever we want it and we'll set this as the object that we're focusing on with our depth of field rather than the text object. We could select this focus object right here, just using this eyedropper. You can also just type it in and pick it from the menu there. Now, wherever we move, this focus object is exactly where we'll be focusing. You can see if we move it in and out, we have a little bit more control right there. So again, usually you don't want this to be too low unless you're really proud of the way you front of your arm chair looks right there. But bringing this up to something a little bit more natural might create a better effect where we can sort of see the light coming in on our stone texture there in the background, we get a little hint of the painting. We can see our statue, but we're really focused on that chair model that we spent so much time modeling and texturing. So I think this is looking really nice as always. Just go ahead and press 12 to render your image, and that'll start cranking away, and depending on the power of your computer, shouldn't take too long and you should be left with a nice new render. Now, we've got a lot more texture in here. We've got this wild wall on the side, we've got some plaster texture on the rest of the walls, and on the floor we sort of have this nice bumpy texture indicating maybe a little bit of imperfection. Again, that's one thing that procedural textures are really good for. I'm really liking the way this image looks. So we'll just go ahead and press Image and then save As. And you can save that wherever you want. I'll save it as a room and we'll save the image. Now you can navigate to wherever that is. Shared on Instagram, shared on Facebook, shared on Twitter, share project gallery below. You've got a lot of options. I'm excited to see what you come up with. In this lesson, we covered adjusting your camera, adding more cameras to the scene using composition guides to frame your shots. We also played a little bit with controlling the depth of field so you can focus on different areas of your scene. Just in general, we've got a new opportunity now to start looking at our scene from different angles, angles where you can really see those textures that we created and let them shine. So I encourage you to keep playing around, add more procedural textures into your scene. Consider adding more models and adding textures to those and checking out different angles that you think might be interesting to really show off the things you're most proud of in your scene. 8. Final Thoughts: Congratulations to you. I'm so happy you've made it to end of this class. We covered a ton of stuff from lighting your scene, all the different types of ways you can light your scene using HDRI images to create a world around your objects. We did materials, we covered the principal chatter, how you can make glassy materials, how you can make rough materials. We also went on to procedural texturing to add surface level details. And we went on from that to even talk about image textures, how we can unwrap objects, add wood textures, stone textures. And we summed it all up with a really nice render, looking at some different views, playing with our focus points and framing our shot to create something really nice. There's just a few things I can leave you with. Some key takeaways from working in blender is really less is more, especially when it comes to lighting use as few as possible. Feel free to crank the power up if you feel like you're not getting enough brightness in your scene. And with materials too, there's a ton of places, you can find materials on the Internet. There's tons of options with all the procedural textures, You can plug things in all over the place. But if I'm being honest, I really don't use all that stuff in every project. Focus on the quality of your image, what you're creating, the story you're trying to tell. And focus on that to create the image you're proud of. You don't need too much. Keep it simple. Thank you so much for taking this class. I hope to see you in some of my other blender classes. Feel free to keep playing around. I'm excited to see where you go on your journey with blender.