Transcripts
1. Introduction: Ready to add some magic
to your blender renders. Hi, I'm Jean Avalgot
a tt artist. In this short class, we will create a stylized
reflective material for the helmet of a cute Cowie
style alien in blender. You will learn how to set up
the material step by step. Make the most of the
node ngular add on for a faster workflow and render
your final image in cycles. By the end of this class, you'll have a fun glass
like effect you can apply to your own projects.
Let's get started.
2. Refraction Shader: Hello, everyone, and
welcome to this class. So here is the scene
I'm going to use to show you the reflection shader. So let's take a look at the scene before starting
doing the material. I have a studio background
behind the alien. I'll show the X so you can see
the lights and the camera. I have a camera here, Min light. In the back, I have a
ring or back light. This light I added later to little bit the face of the alien because
behind the glass, it was a little bit dark. So I'm going to show you how to render
this scene in cycles. We're not going to use EB So here is the first render in cycles. So for now, we don't have the glass shader for the helmet. That's what we're going to do. For now, it just has a
white standard shader. So be sure to pick cycles
here in the render engine. You can use these settings, but it all depends on your graphics card,
on your material. If you can have a better
quality, go for it. I like to use a filmic
in the color management and to use one of these
high contrast presets. In the camera for
the final image, I really love to use deptofeld. In this case, the head
is the focus point. But for now, I'm going to
disable it because it's a bit slow to work with the
depto field activated. So I use two Windows. This one on the left is
for the shader editor, and the one on the
right is to see the results in real
time in our character. So I create a standard material. I call it reflection shader, but you can call it as you want. So you see it, it's not a
very complicated material, but the results, it's nice. So if we add transmission
right ahead, you can see the
pace, but we have a strange result in the face. And that's because this sphere I used to the helmet
don't have a thickness. So I add solidify material. This is a very important
step if you're going to do glass shaders, you have to have a thickness. It's more realistic. So I'm going to test some
settings here in the material, and you can see already it's
looking a bit like glass. You can see the
different with and without the solid modifier. So let's take this
material even further. Right now we have
only the basic stuff. So let's use a small noise
texture for the color. And I'm going to brighten
this nice texture a bit. If you had the node
wrangler activated, you can do Control Shift click. Otherwise, come here on the preference and add ons
and make sure you have the node wrangler
activated because it's really nice to have it and to be quicker when working
in the shader editor. So when you click Control Shift, in any node, you see the
results of this node. So again, just playing with
some of these settings here. I already have more
or less an idea where I'm going to go
with this texture. I'm going to apply a
texture coordinates and the noise texture will be driven by the object UV texture. So as you can see, you
have a little bit of color variation on the
color of the helmet. Okay. I will copy all this
part to gain some time. And I use this nice texture in another way to create some
relief on the character. So I will create this bump node. And with control
and right click, I can cut the connection, and I will control the bump node with the fac output
on the nice texture. And I link the output of the bump load in the
normal input of the material. So again, let's test
some parameters here. I want to have just
a bit of bump, just to have a glass that's
not completely perfect. It will add some
character to the glass. So, again, it's stylized
type of glass material. So let's let's be a bit crazy with this and try to
find something different. So again, I use some bump, but just a little bit, just to create some relief on the on the surface of the glass. Now let's play a bit with the emission parameter
of the shader. So my lighting is yellow, so I think at the end, I'm going to use some
yellow emission. I will fake frenel. So right now, this color
ramp with supplying the emission on all the object. But I'm going to control this color ramp with
frenel so you can already see in the
center it's more transparent and the emissions,
it's really bright. On the edges of the helmet. So let's play with this ramp. I don't want too much of emission, so
something like that. In cartoon shows and
cartoon types image, it's nice to have some frenel
on the material so you can detach the character
from the background. So it's exactly what
we are doing here. You can put any kind of background behind the
character and the frenel will help to visualize the
shape of the glass object. So just playing with the
colors, it's an alien. So green, it's always nice. If you want to have
more blurred glass, you can play with the
roughness on the main shader. So more roughness, the
reflection will be more blurred and the
roughness near to zero, you have almost perfect
reflection and reflection. So let's stay with the
initial values you put. And I think I'm coming back with the yellow, orange finel. And I think it's looking nice. So you can take this knowledge and apply on your own
objects and projects. I hope you are going to have
fun with this little shader. It's not very complicated, but it adds a lot of character to the object and the projects.
3. Conclusion: Thank you for completing
this blender class. You now know how to create a stylized reflective material using no wrangular and
render it in cycles. I hope you had fun
experimenting and that you will use this
effect in your own projects. If you can, please
leave a review and share your render on the
projects and resources page. It really helps and I'd
love to see your results. Thanks for watching.
And remember, keep learning, keep creating
and having fun with blender.
Jean Cavalcante, Compositing Supervisor, Teacher
