Procedural Texturing using nodes alone can create any materials?

[imyujun]

I recently started learning Blender and its nodes.
Based on some Youtube videos, It seems like you can create any material you want with only nodes.
any material means skin, brick, wet floor, wood, marble, muddy earth, etc.
Is it true theoretically to state that using nodes alone w/o image textures can create any material?

[RickyBlender]

if you want to can create with only procedurals texture or using Images with nodes in cycles or EEVEE 2.8

search the forum for procedural textures samples or the WEB for blender

here is one major thread for Cycles nodes set up
there are 100’s of material set up for all kind of materials
take your time go through all the pages and you will learn so much for cycles nodes

Yet Another Thread about Cycles Materials

Leather , thats what i need. @elbrujodelatribu Thanks agains

happy bl

[bandages]

@imyujun

Is it true theoretically to state that using nodes alone w/o image textures can create any material?

I guess, technically, it’s true. But that’s only because you could, potentially, specify a color for every single texel and do your filtering in nodes. Doing so would be wildly impractical as compared to doing the same thing with an image, and have no advantages over the image.

Think about making something like a textile print. No way that defining the print pattern in nodes is going to be easier than just drawing a picture.

[sozap]

Some pattern can be quite difficult to create, maybe with software like substance designer you can create nearly everything, but cycles / eevee is a bit more limited.
this is made in substance, in cycles I doubt it’s possible : https://www.artstation.com/artwork/e1qY3

I used to be very found of procedurals, but it takes quite some time to make and it’s hard to match 100% some natural pattern.
Now 90% of the time I tend to use photo based tiling textures, and mix them with some cloud/ voronoi , it’s way faster and you can get very detailed materials.
Starting form scratch , some procedurals pattern can takes one or two days to create, with photos it’s a matter of hours.

There are really a few cases when taking time to make procedurals pattern is really worth it.

[CarlG]

@imyujun

Is it true theoretically to state that using nodes alone w/o image textures can create any material?

Yes, but as already mentioned, it is highly impractical. Usually you’d require so many generators it’d slow down rendering to a crawl. I’m a huge fan of the hybrid approach. Where possible, use procedurals to break up repeating patterns in a texture image and/or modulate its output in some ways.

Blender or substance painter

Don’t forget you can use external programs to create a complex base texture at high resolution (i.e. marble), and then use cycles procedurals to do trickery to the coordinates to apply it as tiles (or seamless in some cases) where obvious texture repetition (CGI giveaway) is significantly camouflaged. Tiled example: [Bricks_Stones2] Custom box mapped example (non-tiled): [Box_Mapping_Seamless] Closeup of the latter: [Box_Mapping_Seamless_Closeup] Maintaining this kind of detail would r…

PBR wood shader advice- MindTex Generator?

Step 1: Make a few good seamless wood textures in good resolution and pick a couple of them. Structure in the textures is good, but try avoiding obvious directional structure - that can be added using procedurals. 1-2k resolution should be fine. Figure out a way to blend these two textures together so that repetitions becomes less visible, no matter the scale and rotation. Step 2: Make yourself a brick/floorboard generator texture that also outputs random color per tile. Add that color to the…

Multitexture for Blender? Material for use of floor generator

You are welcome, hope it helps. If you run into trouble, let me know. I was thinking of making a video tutorial or something, but never got around to do it yet. Would be good a reason. But there shouldn’t be anything too confusing here.

Sometimes you can even use blender to create those 2D patterns but save them out as images instead due to the rendering cost. But If you do have access to proper tools like substance designer I wouldn’t bother, because you can only have seamless in 1 direction in blender (without stretching or density artifacts), and you’ll have to make it seamless after the fact. I have done this, created several seamless wood textures based on Bartek Skorupa’s approach, where I use this result in further procedural ways to mix and mangle it. Someone elses stuff:

Issues arising from mapping procedural wood on polar coordinates

OK so I have this issue with a custom procedural wood texture I am creating, based on Bartek Skorupa’s wood shader on CGCookie and briefly explained in his texture coordinates talk at the blender conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAUmLcXhUj0 Basically, the idea is to procedurally create a log, from which cross sections would give you a believable wooden plank texture. Now one thing you notice with logs is that features such a wood grain are more easily described by a polar coordinate …

If you want to learn more about manipulating coordinates, this is the video to watch:

Manipulate texture coordinates like a boss - Bartek Skorupa

[imyujun]

Thank you! I appreciate your comment.

[imyujun]

I see. I understand your point. Definitely, in some case, It would be better off using image textures.

[imyujun]

I see. Yes, procedural texturing can take its time to be the way you want.

[imyujun]

Yes, I agree with your hybrid approach. and thank you for your references! I need to study a bit more.

[Korchy]

Take a look at the BIS library, it accenting on Blender procedural materials.

BIS - online material storage

Blender Interplanety Storage (BIS) – online material library add-on for Blender. BIS – the online materials (shaders) storage add-on for Blender 3D creation. With the BIS add-on, you can save materials (groups of nodes) to the online personal library and then convenient search and use them in your blender projects. Saved materials are available from any computer through the add-on installed in Blender. Add-on web page: https://b3d.interplanety.org/en/bis-online-blender-material-storage/ BIS s…

[Jeacom]

Theoretically you can use the Sin and Cos math nodes to implement a fourier transform that can synthetize any texture , not that it would ve practical or easy tho but yes.

[CarlG]

Here is an example of a brick wall and tiled floor using the hybrid approach. They both use the same 6k detail texture. Shown shadeless:

But now I use procedural brick texture and some other generators to break it up. Since brick can output random color per stone, I can use this to look up different parts of the detail texture, color and darken it, apply a hue change, have different scale and rotation - basically no limits. All shadeless, wall is shown without the grout, tiled floor is shown with the grout:

With extra per tile control of the grout/border/falloff, in combination with per tile/brick randomly noised up coordinate, you can get a pretty varied result. The wall is using displacement for maximum effect. The floor is using random color-> normal for inaccurate lay effect. Here a render of the result:

Are there texture repeats in the detail texture? Yes. But they are very hard to spot. This was just an experiment, but I’ve seen way better brick textures than these. Still, the setup is quite complex - possibly to the point of being practically unusable, even if I don’t use procedural textures as a “texture generator”.

[imyujun]

Thank you. This is great. You have added great value to Blender.

[imyujun]

Thank you for your example. Honestly, I undserstood 50% of it. I will study what you’re saying. Thank you again.