This started out as an experiment in procedural skin. There are no image textures besides the eye. Inverted voronoi as displacement happen to look a lot like skin cells up close. I used a few iterations of these plus some extra divots with an additional voronoi texture mapped to a color ramp. I mixed a skin tone with a darker red based on this displacement, which gave it some inherent AO looking stuff, and breaking the monotone of the surface. A small hair particle system finished it off, and left me with a satisfyingly realistic skin material that, matched with some image textures, could definitely be useful.
Other than that, I got some nicely realistic blood using a glass shader and a volume absorption set to a darkish red with very high density (25-60).
I have a quick question. I notice that you have tons of tiny settings changed in your node setup. For example there are all different values. Do you just know what values to put here because you have experience with the nodes and what they do, or are you just experimenting and finding what works best? Because this is the part of materializing that I am stuck on, and I would appreciate some help.
I have only recently become comfortable with creating complex materials with nodes, but I can tell you it is a lot of fun.
The thing you have to know is that if you are not making a very simple material, you cannot hope to type in a few values and have it work straight off. There’s always going to be some sliders to adjust and colors to tweak. To answer your question: both. I have to have experience with nodes and their functionality, which I do, and I also have to experiment around a bit to get the look I want. I know that If I want something to look like skin I should mix a reddish (for the blood inside!) subsurface shader with a diffuse, but I don’t have a dictionary in my brain telling me “Set the scale to exactly 1.2, and the color to this color.” Despite this, it is, obviously, easier to do a material after you’ve done it once before, because you know what kinds of values work.
What I would suggest for getting un-stuck is try making some complex materials based off real world images. Try making a car paint shader, mixing the diffuse with the glossy just right. Or a rubber material, you’ll need to mix a pretty rough glossy shader with a diffuse.
If you feel like a challenge, try to make a skin material! The more experience making random materials that look right, even if not for a project, the better.
Here’s a template I threw together to aid your material creation: Material Demo.blend (831 KB)
Just practice making some materials, and your skills will expand!
Thanks a ton zulubo! You really answered by question.
But I have another quick question, my computer isn’t the fastest (I’m working off a Mac Mini) so as a result It takes me a long time to render out each preview to see the subtle differences in each change that I make when working with nodes. Is there a more efficient way to test different combinations or am I limited by how fast my computer can render a preview.
Thanks by the way for the template, I’m going to start making my first material from scratch now
I’ll let you know how it goes.
Haha I know that challenge! There is, of course, the material preview under the material tab in the inspector, but that usually doesn’t give you the lighting or context that you want. A super handy shortcut is shift b, while in the camera view you can define a box of any size that will be the only thing to render. This is great to get a high sample preview of just the part of the image that you are focused on. To get out of the restricted render (make sure you do this before you do your final render it it’ll only render that part) drag the shift-b box around the whole camera.
If this doesn’t give you the speed you need, you can turn down the number of light bounces (render tab/light paths), and this, while possibly not giving you an accurate render of your materials, will speed up rendering a bit.
Wow! I never knew about that Shift-B shortcut! It helps a lot.
And then one more question. If I were to start to try to learn how to make more complicated materials in cycles like you know how. Do you recommend that I start with procedural materials or materials where I use textures and bump maps. Because I am equally bad at both of them.
Starting out, I’d say either textures, or nothing. Procedural materials are often not applicable. It just so happens that the math that draws voronoi ends up looking similar to the physical processes that grow skin cells
Try some things like different metals, paints, things like rubber, maybe some complex ones like wax or blood, all things that you can do with no textures, just as a surface.
