I’m still fairly new to Blender and there are countless different methods used to texture on Youtube and the internet so I’m still having a difficult time.
I used this Youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzXNZkEoTAk) by BlenderGuru to try and learn more about texturing objects and would like some feedback on my results.
Yes, careful lighting will show off different elements of your material. Right now it’s hard to tell what’s going on becaus the lighting is so flat. In general a good HDRI will help point out what needs improvement to get the effect you want. I have a very boring one loaded by default just so I can see where reflections and such are happening.
A few comments on your nodes:
You should not put your color map into the glossy shader. The only materials that strongly color their reflections are metals. Non-metals should have a white reflection.
Setting the roughness on your diffuse above 1 doesn’t really accomplish anything. The roughness on the diffuse shader has an effect on how it calculates, but doesn’t really make it “look” rougher.
The roughness on your glossy shader is probably a bit high. If you want shiny reflections you need to go below 0.25 at least. Experiment with that to get the effect you want.
For my eye the bump strength should come down substantially also - even a small bump has a pretty dynamic effect. You might want to put that map into the displacement output and use the experimental “real” displacement if you really want to see the tiles sticking up off of the plane. Depends on the scene if you would even notice that, though.
I would suggest using a fresnel input to mix the diffuse with the glossy instead of that texture map. If you look up the CynicatPro tutorials suggested above you’ll find out even more advanced ways to tweak that. If you want some areas to be more glossy than others, another way to do it is to use your B/W texture as the glossy color, or invert it and use it as the roughness input for the glossy.
