Hey everyone Patrik CK with part five of my guide to help make the transition from SketchUp
to Blender.
This is probably the part that many of you have been waiting for and one that probably
took me the longest to get even a basic handle on.
At the onset and as I’ve mentioned before I am no guru and this part of Blender is one
of the most important aspects of the whole program and because of that it is a bit of
a complex system to learn.
Coming from SketchUp and learning how Blender “paints” was a significant mind shift
but like many other parts of this transition the shift is for the better.
The results you can get using Blender’s built in rendering systems are simply nothing
SketchUp can even come close to.
Done right you can get photorealistic renders and even if you don’t need that level of
realism the system is still amazing and may give you that added wow factor on your projects.
We need to start off with simply forgetting everything you know about SketchUp’s painting
system, not that there was much to it to begin with, because again this is a whole different
system.
Blender uses what’s called a PBR material system.
PBR standing for physics based rendering, already you can tell we are working on next
level stuff here.
PBR in the simplest terms allows you to mimic 3D looking texture with all the details from
just 2D images using a layered node system, if that sounds complicated, well that because
it kind of is, but even a basic layout with create impressive results.
The material properties system is a massive part of Blender, in turn this section will
be broken up into three parts.
Part one will start off with the basics of how to add colors to your model and make them
shine.
Then part two will go over how to apply materials and textures using your own or downloaded
texture images.
Lastly I’ll cover some of the basic uses of the material node system to add some cool
PBR textures to your models and renders.
We’ll start with simply adding some color to our model.
To start, we’ll need to create a material to apply to our model.
Out of the box there’s not a library of materials like in SketchUp but you can import
everything you’ve used before or get even more from other users.
We are going to focus on the Material Properties pane in the Properties panel.
The first time you look at this you’ll have a single default material that your entire
model is using.
If you select it you can rename the default to something more appropriate.
Now let’s start by just changing the color, to do this click on the white bar next to
Base Color and choose a new color from the color picker, choose the brightness, or enter
your own color codes using the options below.
At this point you probably didn’t see anything change and that’s because we need to change
our Viewport Shading setting to material preview or render preview.
For the sake of this tutorial we’ll stay in the material preview mode because render
preview will require some lighting setup that we haven’t talked about yet.
After you switch, you’ll see your whole model is the color we just chose.
You can go back and change the color anytime if you like.
Here is where we get just an inclining of the power that Blender’s PBR system brings
to bear.
You’ve probably noticed that besides the color picker there are a ton of other options
to play with.
All these settings are actually part of the most elementary node of Blender’s material
node system, called the Principled BSDF node.
BSDF stands for Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Function which is just a fancy way to say
how light interacts with the surface of a material.
I’ll go over a few of the options that I at least know how they work but I’ll also
leave some links to the real Blender gurus that’ll go over all the settings in detail.
Like always I encourage you play around with these settings yourself, I find it fascination
how much detail you can add with the just the right values.
The best way to see how these settings affect the look of the material is to apply it to
a sphere.
Quick note all these sliders work in the same way, 0 applies no affect and 1 applies the
full affect, and any value in between is just a blending of 0 and 1.
You can click and drag to slide or enter a specific value.
• So first we’ll skip down to the metallic option.
As the name implies this gives your material a metallic shine.
If we slide this back and forth you’ll see how it looks on our new marble here.
• Specular indicates how shiny the object is, basically how much light it will reflect.
• Specular tint determines if the light being reflected is same color as the object
or the color of the light source.
• Roughness defines how clear the reflections are on the surface, 0 being a perfect mirror
and 1 being almost no reflection.
Even with just these four settings you can see that our marble already looks more realistic
than anything we could have hoped to produce in SketchUp.
This is just with a single shade of color, imagine what we can do with actual texture
images.
We actually don’t have to imagine we just have to wait for the next tutorial!
Moving on, we obviously we don’t want the whole model to be the same color, let’s
create some more materials and assign them around the model.
Back at the top of the material properties pane select the plus sign to create a new
material slot, and then select New.
The new material will have a default name that you can change like before, we’ll go
ahead and change the base color again.
Unlike with the default material, this new one will need to be applied to the faces of
our object.
First select the object and enter Edit mode by hitting Tab.
In Face selection mode select a face or multiple faces by holding shift and clicking each one.
With all the faces you want selected, back in the materials pane select the new material
if it’s not already selected and click on Assign.
Now the selected faces all have the new material applied.
You can keep repeating this process until you have all the materials you want.
You can always go back any time to the material options and change the color or any value
of the principled BSDF node.
Up until now we have only been working on one object.
All the materials we’ve created can be easily applied to any object we add.
If we insert another object like this iso sphere then go to the material properties
window and click the globe icon a list of all the materials we’ve created so far will
be shown, simply select one and it will automatically be applied to the whole object.
At the moment the materials are linked, so if you update the color it will change it
across all the objects that have the material applied.
If you like the way the material looks but you want to change, for instance, the color
just for this one object you can unlink ie duplicate it by selecting the number next
to the name.
This value just indicates the number of objects that has this material applied.
After you select it, a sequence of numbers will be appended to the material name signaling
that this is a new independent copy.
Now you can rename it and apply any changes you want without affecting the other objects.
Even though we are just playing with shades of colors and only utilizing the principled
material options I hope you can appreciate the potential of the system.
It’ll become even more apparent once we start diving into the next couple of tutorials.
One last note, the image you see in the reflection of the objects can be changed by clicking
the down arrow next to the Viewport shading choices, this will open the viewport shading
options window.
Here you have 8 presets that you can switch between to see how your material will look
in a few different environments.
That's it for this episode, I hope this helps you out, if it did please leave a like and
share so others can find this content in the future, until next time this has been Patrik
CK, good bye.