Now that we have a good overview of what shaders are, what type of textures there are procedural and
photographic and what that means, and we have our scene set up, let's dive into the meat of this course
as far as shading goes and create these shaders for this Ghostbuster trap so it doesn't look all chromed
out and crazy looking right now.
So let's jump into this shader, which is the one that we've already created and.
One thing I'm going to do to make our lives a little easier is to actually turn on a feature here,
which is we can actually control the 3D view in the viewport.
So I'm not having to constantly move this to the side and then navigate in here and then move this back
so I can go to window 3D manipulation.
And now you can see that I can actually rotate around in here and it will also update the viewport behind
it so that I'm not having to switch back and forth between the two views in this course.
So I'm going to delete the history on this so that we can get to the shader a lot quicker in the tabs
up here.
And the main thing that's wrong with this is, of course, the reflection.
It's way too reflective, of course.
Yeah, it's a metal material.
But if you think about like a painted metal and consider the two surfaces, if you used a microscope,
chrome piece of metal is going to be pretty smooth and a painted material is going to have all the grooves
of the brushstroke and it's going to look a lot more rough on a microscopic level.
That microscopic level actually impacts how the light bounces off of this surface and makes it reflect
very accurately or more roughly.
So you can see it's almost like a perfect mirror because we can see these reference balls in the side
of the the object here, which we can also select individual objects from the Arnold render view.
So with that selected, I'm also going to delete the history on that one so we can get to it a little
easier.
And so we want to increase the roughness and.
That will get us pretty far.
But we also want to make the color, you know, a lot more dark, and we've already gotten pretty far
just with those two small adjustments.
So the other thing to consider once we start shading things are the textures that we're going to use.
And since we know procedural textures are pretty powerful and we don't have to go on to any other program,
let's use those to add more detail.
So if you look at the surface of this thing, it's pretty smooth and it looks kind of perfect.
And any time and CG, you're always trying to fight against perfection because whenever you create a
surface or a sphere, it's going to be perfectly round and the shaders and textures are always going
to be perfect.
So we want to break this up a little bit.
And to do that, we can add up.
There's a couple of different ways we could do it.
We could start to add textures to these attributes by clicking the checkbox.
The first one that we could try is a fractal on the roughness.
So that'll break up how the surface is maybe shinier in some spots and rougher and others.
So let's click this checkbox and we get the render node open and we can go down to fractal here.
And this is one of the most common ones that I use.
I rarely use pretty much anything else besides opening a file and using fractals.
Sometimes I'll use noise, but not really.
Ramp is also very useful, but for the most part, I don't really use any of these besides fractal.
You can get you can get a lot out of fractal and that's what you'll learn in this lesson.
And the next one is it's very versatile.
So we'll click that and we can see that something happened, but we can't really tell what.
So we need to isolate this fractal so we can actually see the texture.
If we right.
Click here, we can see, you know, it's black and white and there's a lot of stuff going on.
But we can't really see that here because it's being applied to the roughness channel.
So for us to see that we need to open up the hyper shade and the hyper shade is something new that we
haven't opened yet.
And it's this little button up here.
And if we click, that will open up a new window.
And your eye shade might look a little different because I've closed down some of the windows that I
don't use that often.
You could go in here and click these Xs and close down what you don't want and open them back up here.
Like, for example, I believe I've closed down the material viewer so we could get that back and we
could dock that in this window.
Like so and I believe this might be closer to what the default view is, but I like to see it in the
actual view that we're doing and we might have more materials later.
So I just closed that one down.
But you can get back to all those things right here and then dock them in this window if you want.
You could also dock this in the viewport or right next to the viewport, that is.
But for our purposes, I'm just going to leave it open so we can kind of slide this around so we can
see everything.
Let's let's take a look at how we can isolate the fractal here because we can't see it.
So what we want to do is map the shader that we've created in this window here.
And to do that, we need to have an object selected and we need to click this little button right here
that has graph materials on selected objects.
So we have our object selected.
Let's graph those materials.
So for our purposes, what we've dealt with so far has just been this object basically, and it's displaying
all this information that we've already seen over here.
And it's displaying in a different way.
And we can see the input connections and the output connections.
And it might look pretty complicated right now.
But in reality, you've already seen all of this.
It's just displayed a little differently over here and the attribute, Ed..
So this is just another way to visually see this stuff and a little more quickly select different nodes.
Each one of these things is called a node.
And so basically the fractal is being piped into the roughness and the fractal has a 2D texture placement
node.
And that just basically says, hey, this texture is going to be placed on UVs in a certain way, is
going to repeat so many times it's going to be mirrored, it's going to, you know, whatever else.
So it looks more complicated than it is.
And you've already seen all this information, but just in a different format.
So don't get too overwhelmed with this view yet or ever.
So with that selected, we can actually go to this little button and the Arnold render and isolate that
texture, which is like a lifesaver because this is a newer thing.
They haven't had this for forever.
So now we can see what we're actually doing with the fractal texture.
And if we we can turn that on and off here.
And the main thing that we want to consider is when we piped in this fractal, you know, and it's a
black and white image, if you notice closely here, it's actually outputting not the color, but the
alpha, because the specular roughness will only accept one value and a color is combined of red, green
and blue.
So when you try to output a color, it's looking for three things to output into.
But because roughness is of one value, we can see by the slider on the shader itself, it's not like
the color value.
This would have RGB, but this is a single value, right?
Just like roughness is going to be a single value.
So it's outputting the Alpha and the Alpha.
If you're not familiar with images and Photoshop and all that kind of a thing, Alpha just means transparency.
So.
The Alpha is being interpreted as roughness, but.
The alpha is pure white, basically, um, you know, we're looking at a black white image, but it's
using the alpha, so it's not really doing what we want it to do.
We want to use the color information we could map in just the AH and just choose one of these three
channels.
And as soon as we do that, you can see this update and now we get to see that fractal effect, the
roughness.
So the one disadvantage of using just a single channel is that we do not have access to kind of global
controls to increase or decrease the this channel.
But if we use the Alpha and we just pipe the Alpha in again, it'll go back to not being able being
visible.
But if we pipe that in, we actually have these alpha gain, an alpha offset controls.
So if we use this is kind of the key here.
Remember, this alpha is luminance.
When I click that and that basically will say, hey, use the alpha channel or use the luminance of
the channel for the Alpha.
So because it's just black and white, you're basically just copying all this color information because
there is no color.
It's just, you know, a value from zero to one.
It's piping that into the alpha now.
So that's the kind of trick to do here.
And the reason why we're using Alpha and not just the ah channel or the are the Green Channel or the
Blue Channel is because we have these two sliders here and we can control with one control the effect
of this texture.
Whereas if we used the Red Channel, there is no, you know, Red Channel controller here.
Right.
So that's why we need to use the alpha channel for the fractal.
And I know that might seem a little complicated, but, you know, read watch this, create this yourself,
follow along so that you kind of ingrain this in your mind because this is going to come up again and
again.
And fractals are something that's used quite often.
So you want to get comfortable with understanding why this is the case, why we're using the Alpha and,
you know, user use the R if you want to use a G, it doesn't really matter because it's just black
and white.
So whatever color channel you use, that's fine.
But then you'll get stuck into a position where you're like, you know what, I just want to Dallas
back just a touch and then you'll be totally stuck because there is no control like that on the fractal
note.
And that's why we're using Alpha.
OK, so I think that's hopefully you understand that now.
But so look at this.
You know, we added a ton of detail and one node.
So if we go back, we can see that now this object doesn't look perfect like it did before.
It looks maybe a little worn and and whatnot.
So in this lesson, we've gone really far.
We've learned a lot.
We learned about the Hypercharged.
We learned how to create a little more texture here.
And in the next lesson, we're going to create an entirely new material and maybe tweak this fractal
a little bit.
But the next thing we're going to create is this brushed metal shader here that you can see in the reference.
So I'll see you in the next lesson where we will try to create this shader.
All right.
Thanks for watching.