Introduction¶
This chapter will introduce the Shader Editor and UV Editor of Blender which lets you create advanced materials to improve the look of your visualizations. The Shader editor and UV editor go hand in hand, with the UV-editor (and 3D viewport) you'll learn how to UV-unwrap your meshes and manipulate the UV-coordinates and with the Shader editor you'll project procedural or image textures based on the created UV-coordinates.
You'll learn how to apply PBR (Physically based rendering) style textures and where to find them, to make your objects look photo real.
And lastly a commonly used experimental feature called Adaptive Subdivision will be combined with vertex displacement to create some great looking micro-displacement details on the surfaces of your objects.
Before you start with the exercises the following video will give you the theoretical and practical background to make these exercises. In this video there are some Blender walk-throughs, if you want to follow along you can use the walk-through files in the walkthroughs/advanced/advanced_materials directory.
Blender 4.1 changes
The walkthrough video was recorded with Blender 2.92, however the current version (Blender 4.1) used for the this course has some additional changes and features. Most are minor UI changes which will not conflict with the course material, although some of them are worth to mention and could cause confusion. These changes are:
- The Principled BSDF node menu is subdivided into sub-menus in Blender 4.1, giving it a better overview. Luckily all inputs that are hidden under a sub-menu will not be used in the course material.
- The strength input for the
Normal map-node handles the strength values differently now. Previously the value of1.0was too strong, but now that value is fine while the value0.1is too small and not noticeable. - The modifiers in the add-modifier menu are now shown in sub-menus instead of a column-based view.
After you watched the video about advanced materials you are ready for the exercises!