Creative Shrimp: Procedural Texturing Course
Aidy Burrows writes:
Early bird discount till the 24th May
The Procedural Texturing course aims to level up your procedural texturing skills, while taking you step by step, through the journey of building a realistic mossy brick wall shader. With the techniques explored here, you will unlock the power of nodes, enabling you to create countless other materials.
INSTRUCTOR: LUCA ROOD
Luca is a 3D Software Developer, Researcher, and Technical Artist, with over a decade of experience with Blender, and a long term passion for procedural node-based workflows in particular.
What you’ll learn:
- A wealth of procedural texturing techniques
- How to create a realistic procedural mossy wall shader from scratch
- Procedural texturing workflow
- The material nodes essentials
- Pro tips for utilizing the power of nodes in Blender
- Tips for organizing your node trees and keep your sanity
This course spends most of its time at an intermediate level, but if you do consider yourself a beginner and want to dive in head-first, we’ve actually got you covered too! There’s nearly 2 hours of specifically beginner targeted content to get you started, though we feel confident that there are many things within those chapters that will surprise even more seasoned node enthusiasts.
See you there, in infinite resolution!
Sincerely caffeinated,
Gleb, Aidy & Luca
This looks like something I really need especially as this subject is a total mystery to me. Right enough waffle I’m off to buy the course.
Rob
Great to hear Rob! :D A lot of preparation, planning and production went into it, Luca has hit it out of the part on this one, I hope it shows and you get what you need out of it. :) Any probs just let us know. :)
Aidy.
My biggest issue with procedural textures, specifically these that use adaptive displacement, is that they are at the end of the modifier pipeline with no way to back the mesh (that I know anyways). Most of the reasons I would use adaptive displacement is for something like terrain or some kind of important surface, however one it is added you can’t add particles or geonodes properly so it’s pretty much pointless for those reasons. It can be useful for adding subtle texture displacement to shaders however it is extremely expensive and I find 99% of the time you can’t see a difference between displacement and normals. Finally, I’d add, the material in the video is great, but is it practical? Unless the focus of the piece was the wall would it be better to not use adaptive displacement? If it’s a wall off to the side or out of focus would it be better to avoid the expensive cost of using it? Also since you can’t convert it to a standard mesh you are pretty much limited to blender, you can’t use it in games or other software. If it changes the topology in someway you are pretty much pigeon holed into a very small use case
You raise some great points and questions that would probably make a good article in of itself that basically center around procedural vs image textures.
Procedural texture –
Pros…
Flexibility, variation, seamless due to not repeating.
Cons..
expensive to render, takes time to initially setup.
Image texture –
Pros…
Fast (if you can find the appropriate image). Photoreal.
Cons…
Limited variation, limited resolution. Not accurate accompanying maps such as height, roughness etc (assuming the images aren’t derived from scans)
Procedural and image textures should often be combined, and used where sensible. In fact something we’ll be adding to the course pretty soon is the baking process for taking the result from procedural to image textures which can then be used in game engines.
Something to note that the course isn’t necessarily just trying to teach a ‘brickwall’, really this is teaching procedural texturing in general though using a brickwall as its main example. The viewer should feel confident to create any number of textures after completing it.
“If it’s a wall off to the side or out of focus would it be better to avoid the expensive cost of using it (adaptive displacement)?” This is exactly the question to be asking, where is it appropriate to be using? Does it make a difference? That’s down to the artist dealing with the individual circumstances. Factoring in silhouettes and where the camera lingers, what the lighting is doing etc. Plus how powerful is the render farm they’re using? Or perhaps there isn’t one available etc.
“Also since you can’t convert it to a standard mesh you are pretty much limited to blender” – This isn’t strictly the case, you can bake out to a heightmap, use a high resolution mesh with a displacement modifier and then either retopologize and bake again or do a simple decimate to keep the resolution reasonable.
Though it’s worth noting that for a lot of artists the project might not need to leave Blender.
Anyway, hope what i’m saying makes some kind of sense and i haven’t misinterpreted any of your points.
Thanks,
Aidy.