I'm a clown with regards to materials and textures

[Phoenix492]

Hey everyone!

I’m just going to come right out, and say it : I have no clue when it comes to Materials and textures.

I have read and watched plenty of tutorials where you guided through the steps required to complete the task. I have created things in Blender over the last few years that I would never have been able to do without all of the support of everyone out here. So yeah, I can follow instructions pretty well. But what do I actually know about materials and textures? Nothing.

I constantly see the replies to this forum from you guys - “Oh, well just put such node here, and such a node here and that will work” How do you guys know that? I can’t find anything that goes into the absolute basics. For one example, I’ve read Andrew Prices’ encyclopedia where he breaks down every node - Extremely hopeful. But why do I need certain nodes to go in a certain order for thing to work correctly?

I don’t believe a lot of this comes from experience - I’ve been playing with Blender for a few years now, but still my materials and texture work comes from complete guess work. Start with the BSDF node…and see what happens. Watching some timelapses (for example) on youtube - the artist instantly creates a masterpiece first time, and then just does minor adjustments to achieve the required look. When I do anything by myself, I end up having to start texturing / materials over completely numerous times, and then tend to just quit when I don’t get the result I want.

This is an issue. I have finally decided to start on my first major project of my own (an animation short) and I wanted it to look relatively realistic - something I cannot seem to achieve on my own.

Seriously - How do you guys learn everything you need to know? Is there a book that I missed out on that I should read?

Sigh…maybe I should just keep doing tutorials for the rest of my life and hope it just clicks one day? (hasn’t over the last few years mind…)

[Breagha]

Heh - I’m the exact same… I’m working on an eyeball at the moment, and it’s starting to look kinda okay… But I have little idea how I managed to get there, apart from some math that the nice people here helped me with…

I think - or well, that’s what I do - experimenting and jus throwing in things to see what happens is the best way besides tutorials… There is a book on Blender Materials - probably a lot, actually - but I think you can only read so much before you have to go and try on your own anyways…

Go do your project and then come ask when you have specific questions… It seems to work sorta okay for me… So far

[JA12]

A big topic. My suggestions are to observe reality (use references) and pay attention to the environment/lights when doing those observations and building a material.

Use references to observe what a material look like and try to understand why it looks that way. It’s not just about the material, lighting affects it too, so does the environment setup, camera setup, and render settings. It’s that way when taking photos of real objects and if you try to achieve a specific look, you have to reverse engineer the lighting setup and the environment to some degree (and fake the conditions and/or the effect it has on the material).

What color is a blue bottle in a pitch black room? Texture maps are used to control various material properties, be it a diffuse map to affect diffuse color, specular/glossy map to affect reflection strength/color/sharpness, displacement map to control the geometry offset, normal and bump maps to make a surface look uneven, masks to mix colors/textures/shaders/other masks.

All of the material and texture setup goes to waste if you put the thing in a room without lights. Having the lighting setup wrong might not be as dramatic as total darkness but it still can make the material look different than what you intended. For example, if something is too reflective, maybe it doesn’t look that way because the texture controlling it is wrong but because the light is too strong or the camera angle is at a direct reflection angle with the light, unlike the camera and lights in the reference photo you’re using.

The environment is an important aspect to take into account. Cycles by default uses global illumination, meaning it can bounce light, which gives it the ability to make things look more realistic because it mimics how real light behaves. But going to the other direction, observing a material behaviour and trying to replicate it might take a wrong turn if the effect you see comes from the environment instead of being built in a material.

As repeated many times on the forum, most things reflect and reflective things need something to reflect. A perfect mirror is an extreme example where a photo of a mirror can show a reflection of a different person than what your mirror shows. It’s not because their mirror has any more special material than yours, it’s because it reflects a different environment.

More subtle example would be a brand new, full white, coffee mug on a table. If you ask someone what color it is, they’re going to say it’s white. But if you take a photo of the mug and inspect the color values, most of the values are anything but white. There will be all kinds of color variations/tints depending on the environment, camera angle, camera settings and the lighting setup used for taking the photo.

Point being, if you want to build a coffee mug material and make the mug look like one on the table, you probably want to make it reflect the environment as the real one does, and then replicate/fake the environment it reflects. The effect you’re missing might not be as clear as a reflection on a glossy surface, but more subtle like a color change or light intensity change because of reflected light (global illumination at work). A white surface reflects more light than a dark surface, and a red tint on a object might not be a material property/defect, it might be an effect of reflected and colored light from a red object nearby.

[Taipan]

Hi

My advise would be…Play - play - play and play again with node setup…Not the complicated one…But the very bassic.

Just a Diffuse and a Glossy shader through a Mix shader…There is a Fac in the mix shader…plug a input/layer weight in.

With this Bassic set up You can make many different material.

Go to the manual…http://www.blender.org/manual/render/blender_render/materials/index.html

and read all You can about shaders and material…Try some of the examples it will give good idea of how they work.

Just remember light is important too…E.g…It’s hard to see Bump map if there is not sidelights or hdr.

When You know these nodes…you can start by making more exciting material…With texture Node maybe…)

The most important is to not make it to complicated use as few node as You can…Now just go through all the texture node and see what they can do…Here is a picture of a setup with texture node through a Bump map node.
Play with all the settings go to next Texture node just plug it in where the other is…And…

I’m a Noob but this is what help Me on My way to figure out the insane node system…Have to say when I start understand the very bassic it has been a lot easier to get further…it’s incredibly what one can do with Node.

Don’t forget to use shortcuts if You don’t…Last, another thing there help Me is collect node pictures as references.
And try to cut it all so much down You can E.g There is a lot textures but they are all textures and there is lot’s of input’s but all do the same put something in…You see…Build it slowly up step by step…Puff Puff

From a Happy Noob

Tai