This is my first attempt at organic objects and materials. I have wanted to create a still life scene like this for quite a while and finally felt like I am up to the challenge. I hope you like it!
Everything was modeled in Blender 2.8 and rendered with Cycles. The vignette was added in Gimp. The wicker cornucopia, grapes, and corn are all proceduraly generated using cycles nodes. Pears, apples, and pumpkins were hand painted in Krita. The PBR maps for the pine cones were made via photo manipulation in Krita as well. The walnuts, table, backdrop, and leaves are all using material maps obtained through Textures.One.
That was a fairly simple 2D mesh of two circles side by side with a screw modifier applied to make a segment of the braid. Then an array modifier to stack it end to end. Lastly, a curve modifier was added that targeted a circle curve placed where I wanted the rim to be. So there was very little manual modeling involved in that.
How did you create the basketweave? I’m looking for a similar texture for outdoor chairs… a node based procedural texture sounds intriguing. I have a background in CompSci so procedural anything comes fairly easily…
I’m still in my first month or so of Blender for real - completed the donut (and the coffee cup) and I’m working through the modelling of a new house… interiors are a brand new learning curve - and procedural textures are likely to be extremely useful.
I’ve sketched interiors for years, so the 3D/graphical/visualization stuff is fairly easy - but trying to get what’s in my head into a texture is… challenging. While ‘texture painting’ worked for the donut, I don’t want to have to hand paint thousands of square feet of house!
At the moment, I’m working on ‘concrete tiles’ mixed with the occasional ‘glossy’ right now to recreate a look that my wife want to see for a secondary bathroom. Version 3 of probably 30 or so - so understanding procedural textures better would be a huge gain!
I’ve played with ‘brickr’ which gets ‘close’, but I’d rather roll my own where possible… (just because doing so is fun, not because I necessarily need to!)
The weave of the basket is actually physically modeled. The material on it is a photo of my cutting board, manipulated and mixed with other procedural elements. That said, the whole thing could be done procedurally. Check out this post by @Gemn for just that!
I know procedural materials can be fun and a whole lot more adaptable than other methods, but are you familiar at all with the basics of using PBR maps? The best way I have found to getmaps for free AND with CC0 licensing is by going to Textures.one. They search the top handful of sites that provide them. Below is the most basic node setup you would use them in for Cycles or Eevee. Just make sure that all of the image nodes besides the diffuse are set to non-color.
Found an inaccuracy in my initial description. The grapes are not entirely procedural as I had described. I painted the diffuse and used some other gray scale textures to influence the roughness and bump. It’s a bunch of nodes, but it does use some image files.
I am working through this course on procedural material creation by Joakim Tornhill (@MagicGlow ) at the moment. It’s pretty good so far. That’s really the only procedural advice I feel qualified to give at the moment
Been trying to get an ‘arctic’ white oak, with medullary rays & planing bumps to replicate the flooring we’ll install! Whaddya know - you done done it already!
I used the basic oak model you provided, tweaked the colors and the parameters, ‘joined’ the PRO & LITE versions in a new group, so I can use a common parameter set and see the flooring in LookDev, and added a gamma to lighten things overall
Your procedural texture saved me many hours of futzing around with texture painting and faking depth/normal maps…
Thanks for the input, and I have indeed tried PBR materials.
Finding the right PBR material is the problem! I am trying to replicate actual surfaces… so often have a reference photograph, but nothing else. So, I have images, but flat is…dull, and life is too short to look through and try every variant of wood/stone/fabric/etc and then to ‘tweak’ them to better approximate my goal!
So to get normal/displacement/roughness/specular maps that actually directly relate to MY material (ref pics) is still a challenge. Good procedural textures are a way to ‘fake’ those, and get much closer than I could just painting or manually faking it!
I have definitely used PBR materials for as much as I can, though, because they are a lot less ‘expensive’ in terms of render time, and are generally accessible in EEVEE so I can do ‘fast models’ to try lots of different ‘looks’ without waiting for renders.
Thanks @GEMN for the instructions to bake the textures… There are a few places where I’ll do ‘glamour shots’ and may want to tweak continuously to get just the right looks… (so will keep the parametrics) And others where I want faster visualizations, so will use baked textures. GEMNs example of baking prior to animation is a good one – Using a decent baked texture in EEVEE means faster animations, so I can actually do the ‘walkthough from front door to kitchen reveal’ without having to buy days on a super high powered render farm!
