I'm a woodworker and regularly use Blender to design and visualize furniture designs. Up to this point I've been using a procedural wood texture addon called Carvature 2.0, but never really understood the inner workings of the node setup, or how to setup a wood texture on my own. This is video was so helpful to make sense of procedural wood textures. I've learned so much from all of your videos. Please keep them coming!
@@christopher3d475 hopefully we'll be able to use it to generate rosewood, maple, ash, and alder (These are the classic woods used in electric guitars)👀
Cool Tutorial, I had no idea about the texture space toggle, it's so handy! One thing that you can do instead of 'Shift+W' and then choosing from the menu is simply just press 'Ctrl+T' which is just quicker but does exactly the same thing.
Great texture result! If you want to use the Node Wrangler even more efficiently, do not use Shift+W to get the texture setup from the menu. Just select the Wave or Noise Texture node and press Ctrl+T and you will get the texture setup immediately. Oh and for the Texture Coordinates: if you modeled your chess pieces with scale applied, there is no need to manually set the Texture Space on all of them. Just use the Object output of the Texture Coordinate node instead of Generated and the material will be spaced the same on all pieces. Also the Shift+Ctrl clicking can not only be used for previewing the node outputs, you can use it on the Principled BSDF as well to reconnect it to the material output, instead of pulling out a connection manually while using Shift+Ctrl all the time for the other nodes.
Very cool result! I'll give a shot! There is one thing I do differently: With the Texture Coordinate I like to use "Object" and leave it without any object selected. It acts like a 1m³ cube for the texture space, so I dont need to change the texture space settings for every object.
Your tutorials are some of the best Blender content on RU-vid. I like the way you explain what you are doing, and how all these techniques fit together. Thanks!
the phase offset just shifts the 0-point of the wave. i.e. it determines what the texture looks like at the origin (and therefore, what it looks like everywhere else because the wave naturally repeats)
@@christopher3d475 yeah in a scene like this with just a handful of textures it’s unlikely to make any huge difference, but good to remember that some shader settings can impact performance
I had no idea about how to show the texture space in Blender until I saw this video. I so very much appreciate how you are revealing some fundamental usage and workflow tips along with your excellent shader setup suggestions. Thank you!
Just in case, the bump map uses the black and white information of the input, you don't need to adjust it with saturation and you are using a bump with a distance of 1 meter, which means your bump goes from 0 (black) to 1 meter (white), taking into account that your bump input was a dark grayscale image, I would say that your bump is about 10 to 20 cm height, you only reduce its visual strength (a mix with a 0 height bump) but not the height... By the way, I love them all your videos, this one too!
Your videos are just great, thanks a lot, Christopher! Would be cool to see sequels of your previous videos, which did not come to cover materials application, with that topic covered.
Hey, that's a very good looking wood you got there! I just got a few tips :) Instead of fiddling with that texture space in the beginning you could just use the Object output from the Texture Coordinate node to get it to behave the same between different objects. Just make sure that you've applied the scale on everything! And when putting stuff into the height in the bump node you don't have to use that HSV before that, the bump node does by itself that internally (or any node where you put a yellow output (color, aka three channel float) into a grey input (single channel float). Also you should never use the Strength to change the amount of bump, instead use Distance. Distance is in scene units and gives the exact same effect as if you're using Scale on a Displacement node, so if you set the Distance to 1 that bump is going to simulate the look of something that's bumped 1 meter (if Blender unit is set to meter and using a texture that goes from 0 to 1) from the surface, or if you set it to 0.001 it's 1mm which is what I probably use it to for these small objects. If you instead use Strength and still have the Distance set to 1 it takes that 1 meter and kind of "fades" it out giving a less physically accurate look. This mistakes is something I see often, but I also see why everyone does it (including me for a long time), it's just feels more natural to use Strength. I've tried to get the devs to somehow make this clearer but I haven't succeeded. Anyways, you stil got some really good wooden chess pieces, so my tips might just be nit-picking I guess :)
Thanks for the comment. Regarding the bump node and grey value. Since I was going to customize the greyscale information for the Color Ramp, I decided to put the HSV desaturation process in front of the bump even though as you noticed, it isn't strictly necessary or bump. And yes, the Bump node is probably the worst documented of all the nodes.
I didn't specifically need to desaturate the input for bump, but since I was going to need a desaturated input for the Color Ramp, I just put that step ahead of the bump node. Lots of flexibility in the system.
If you select all the chess pieces, or whatever objects you want to affect you can hold Alt before clicking the Auto Texture Space to turn it off for all selected objects, and hold Alt after dragging down XYZ size to select them all before pressing enter. You can do all kinds of batch parameter changes with Alt.
