Material maker 1.6 - your first brick wall, what is normal map, how does slope blur, and gradients

Hey, I'm Anfa. Welcome to another material maker tutorial. In this tutorial, we're going to make some bricks because bricks are the bees knees. Wait, no, that would be hive. That would be beehive. That's a bees knee. No, wait. What? We're doing brick. Stop it. All right. So, uh you should be already a bit familiar with what you're seeing right here. And actually what we can do is keep this below others so our little sweet um key hint stays stays visible. All right, sweet. So let's make some bricks. Thankfully, Material Maker provides us with some brick patterns. Let's just type brick. And you can see that we have quite a few different versions of bricks. Now a cool thing is that we can build with the simplest one and make something that then we can replace the basic underlying pattern and achieve uh something very similar but with um well a different shape. So let's try and do that kind of like a modular approach. Well, because this is all procedural. This is non-destructive. So, we can replace the first inputs and all entire process is going to just adapt and work. That's the power of being procedural. All right. So, the very basic thing we need to do is just see how this looks. All right. I'm using my mouse wheel to zoom. I'm mouse middle clicking my my mouse wheel uh and moving my mouse to pan. So, this is our brick. That's not the best. I'm going to reduce the resolution to 1024 cuz that's really not going to make a big of a difference and it's going to speed up processing and maybe make this a bit faster. Not that we need that much speed, but well, I'm recording this at the same time, so you know, it's always a bit harder on a computer to just to do it when you're recording rather than just doing it. Okay, I'm going to try to make this tutorial not 20 hours long. Okay, so the basic thing we want to do is make the brick stand out. No, that's a different thing. First, we need to change the colors. So I'm going to do type colorize. And you can see the second thing is filter colorize. And here it is. So now I'm going to just drag and drop these here. So now our output is colorized. Now because the curve here is the gradient is exactly the same as it was before then well it didn't change much. But if I swap these around, and we can also use this little tools menu to reverse or evenly distribute. We can already see that now we have black bricks with white mortar, which is kind of more what we would expect. Now I'm going to change the bricks to be red. So, I'm clicking on this little thing here, and double clicking opens the color uh picker, but I can also single click on this button on the bottom. I'm going to pick my color of brick. Pick your color of brick. Maybe let's make it a little bit orangey. Tiny bit orangey. Sweet. Clicking again. It's saved. Now, what if I make the transition to mortar a bit different? like a little bit of a darker thing. So, there's like a little outline around my bricks. Cool. And finally, the mortar is kind of blindingly bright. So, I'm going to tone it down a bit. Okay, that's a very simple, kind of cartoony looking brick texture. We can make it more, we can make it super retro by dropping our resolution all the way down. We could also change this interpolation mode of our gradient here. By default, it's linear, but we can also go with smooth step or cubic or constant. Now, if we want to do pixelated bricks, constant is going to be our friend here. Um, yeah, that's nice. That's nice pixelated bricks. Okay, but we're not going to do pixels. Um, so I'm going to back off from this and go to cubic. Cubic is an interesting thing because your nodes in this or your points in this gradient kind of give the trajectory. So if we go with a histogram. Oh no, maybe we can do it somewhere something else. Is it called profile? Right, profile. Okay, I'm going to insert another colorize node just to show you how does the interpolation work. Colorize. So let's go with this profile and going to go with curve and let's go with preview. Now you can see this is our gradient and this is our curve, our profile. I'm going to make this a bit wider and I'm going to go I think if I shiftclick it's going to stick this one. No control. Okay, control-clicking makes it stick. So, you know, even if I click on different nodes, preview is locked here. I can actually open up a second preview 2D. I think shift locks things to the second one. Yeah. So, if I hold shift and click um on something, it's going to be stick stuck to the preview 2D second. And I can't if I controlclick on something, it's going to be put here. What is this lock? What does it lock? Does it lock? Um Oh, this is the locking. Okay, so it locks what is put there. But I can still Okay, that's kind of weird. I don't understand this fully. Maybe I shouldn't be teaching you things I don't fully understand. Let's go back to things I do understand. All right. So um I'm going to control-click to lock this profile to the top and I'm going to shift click. Need to un shift click to put our gradient. So now I'm going to open up this gradient editor. Now we can do pin. So this expanded gradient editor view doesn't close when we click away. That's nice. So now let's maybe switch the view type to clamp so we don't have this repeating thing. And let's observe the the profile. So you can see now this is basically showing us the value from 0 to one in relation to the horizontal axis. So I can basically draw a line using this gradient. Now what look what happens when I switch to smooth step. You can see now it's a little bit of an S. And this S if I insert a point here we have two S's. which touch. So, this is interesting because it's called smooth step, but it doesn't really create like a very super smooth transition if we have a point in the middle. That's interesting, right? I can right click with my mouse to delete a point. And I can double click with my left mouse button to insert a point. So, smooth is interesting. It's creating this smooth curve, but it's creating a smooth step curve between each pair of points. So, yeah, that's interesting. Now, let's switch to cubic. Ah, this is going to be cool. So you can see by the way if you hit control you can snap the position of uh the point to 10 like 20th of um to 12th of the position. And also this slider here is basically um letting you set the position or you can even type 0.5 is exactly in the middle and you can switch between points in your gradient editor here. So you don't have to click on these things at all. You don't have to touch this bar. You can switch points here. I mean okay you do need to touch it if you want to add a point. I think there's no other way to add points other than double clicking. Right. But let's go back to our nice little curve. I'm going to delete this and I'm going to try and hit. Okay. So, you can see cubic is actually really interesting. If I move this middle point, you can see that we actually have a very smooth curve. Oh, so if I go too far, that curve kind of overshoots. Now, if I go back, if I insert another point, you can see that cubic kind of goes bonkers uh in a good way. So, I'm going to insert a bunch of points. And the cool thing about a cubic is that it can stay kind of sort of linear. But if you start moving things around, you can see that everything is kind of like behaving like this line is like a trace of an object that has a mass and it accelerates upwards and downwards and like so the curve is smooth in that the derivative of this curve is continuous. I don't see any discontinuities. Not so much with smooth step. There's a bunch of discontinuities. I think if we took a derivative of this, we would have a bunch of discontinuities. So this is not uh a smooth curve if I as I would say which is interesting given the name smooth step. But cubic interpolation, yeah, it does make smooth things. But if you put the similar values too close together, look how crazy it gets. That's insane. I love it. Right. So, that's what that was a little digression about the gradient editor and the curves or our interpolation type. And now, let's go back to linear. You can see this is exactly what you'd expect. Sharp corners, not not a smooth curve by any means, but there is no overshoot. And with cubic, well, there is overshoot. And you can do crazy things if you're not careful. But you can also achieve some really nice smooth curves. Love it. Okay, let's get rid of these. Delete. Let's go back to our brick. I'm going to zoom in with my mouse wheel. My mouse wheel. And let's switch to preview 3D. Okay. So, this is nice, but the bricks are kind of flat. So, let's add a normal map and just take this, put it through the normal map and put it into the normal map output. And just like that, our bricks are now looking bumpy. Now, if you don't know what a normal map does, we can visualize it if we decompose its output. So let's connect this to a decompose node. And now the decompose node basically takes a multi- channelannel input like a color which is red, green, blue or an RGBA which is red, green, blue and alpha and it outputs red, green, blue and alpha in separate channels. So we can look at them. Now we can see this is red and this is the horizontal information of our normal map. So this tells us the gray thing is the neutral, the black is pointing to the left and white is pointing to the right. If we go back to our normal map, you can see these are the edges of our bricks, the vertical edges of our bricks, which create patterns in the horizontal component of our normal map. Interesting. Now, let's look at the green channel of the normal map. Huh. Here we have the horizontal edges creating patterns in the vertical component of our normal map because we have horizontal X and vertical Y. Now, if you put them together, we get this. Now, you might be used to a normal map looking a little bit different, and I'm going to show you why. Normal convert. So, if we convert this normal map to an OpenGL format, I think um well, we can see what happens. I'm going to control shift D, duplicate this decompose node, and now we can compare. So you can see that it actually flipped the ver the the the value of our horizontal information. So the red channel it's flipped. What was black is now white and vice versa. How about the horiz vertical one? The vertical one stayed unchanged. Okay. What about the third one? What did the third one even do? Well, that's the interesting thing. So he see this is blue. So X Y Z this is the not the vertical this is the third dimension this is the depth depth information in the normal map. What? Yes. And let's look at this one. Oh, it's also inverted. What was black is now white and what was gray is gray. What? Yes. So you can see the normal map contains nothing more than a vector a three component vector. So xyz that's a free components of our vector. Every pixel in here and there are pixels if we look really closely because the normal map node has a buffer and so it converts it renders our shader which is doesn't have pixels. This is like you know mathematically defined. This is infinite precision. It's as many pixels as you ever want to show. But their normal map has a buffer which you can disable. By the way, if you do controll and click and drag up, you can zoom in as well. I'm going to disable the buffer and you will see that this changes a little bit. Huh. Let's switch to a much more chunky thing. If I turn on the buffer, you can see that this is smoother. Now, we normally want the buffer because converting things to normal map is a little bit of expensive thing. So if you have anything more complex behi before the normal map node, if you disable the buffer, you might suffer some performance penalty. Let's go back to 1024. Okay, so right back to the normal maps. I keep going into degressions. Well, I guess that's going to be the theme for these tutorials, digressions. But I hope you're going to learn things anyway. So horizontal vertical for dimension depth. So this is the value that says how much does the point on this normal map point towards the screen. When it's white, it means it's perfectly perpendicular to the screen or parallel rather. Sorry, perpendicular. Perpendicular is the vector is the normal vector. So normal vector is the vector that is perpendicular to a surface and a normal map is imposing a different normal vector that is not real. It's fake. It's a it's a trick. It's a mathematical trick to make flat things look bumpy. So it's imposing an a fake normal vector onto a flat surface which interacts with the lighting of the 3D scene and gives us the feeling sorry the look the appearance of depth of three dimensions even though the texture is really flat as we can see can I yeah if I hold shift I can look you can see that our bricks are not really sticking out however we can fix that too you See if we connect this thing to here. Well, now something weird happened. First, let's think that what we've just done. So, this is the depth input. GDAU exposes this as um depth mapping or it's sometimes called height mapping or displacement mapping. So what this does is it further simulates depth. So now if I zoom out you can see that our bricks appear to have parallax effect and that is exactly what is going on. There is some shader trickery going on that looks at every point on this sphere and says okay from which direction is the is the view is the observer looking at us. So where's the camera? Okay. So if the camera is here and our normal vector of the geometry is this, then that means if we offset the sample of the texture underlying this direction by that much, it's going to look like this is bump. This is uh extruded, which is a neat visual trick, but it's not. There is no geometry behind it. So this is wrong. Of course, we can fix that by inserting an invert node. I'm going to click, drag, drop, and type invert. Enter. Click and drag and replace the depth input. Huh, nice. Now, why did that work? So, if I click here, you can see this is our black and white. This is our mask for bricks. Bricks are bright. Grout is dark. Grout mortar. What does it tell us? that the high values correspond with things sticking out. But this is called a depth map. So in a depth map, the bright values are pushing in and not sticking out. That's why we had to invert this. So our bricks now are black and our mortar is white. So this is converted to a depth map from a height map. This is called a height map. This is a little bit counterintuitive. I kind of wish that material maker would hide this off this weirdness uh and just call this a height, but it kind of forces you to think more akin to what is really going on because we can only simulate things being um extruded inwards. We can't really properly simulate things poking out. As you can see our our silhouette is still totally totally flat. Now there is there are is technology to do parallax occlusion mapping which this is doing with silhouette correction. I don't know how to do that but it's possible. It exists. The technology is out there but we don't have it in GDAU at least. I mean unless you implement it yourself or find some shaders but we can do this. However, we can still do better if we switch the model configure and do it tessillated. That's going to make our sphere more dense but well that doesn't show any difference. Okay, I'm going to switch this static PBR material type. I'm going to right click on top and go to static PBR material displacement. Click. Whoa. What just happened? Look, our bricks are actually physically as much physically as pixels on a screen can be. There is actual geometry now. And unfortunately, it's really not high fidelity. So, let's go back to the model menu, sphere configure, and click this tessillated, which adds a lot more geometry that can be displaced. And this is a proper displacement material. Now, if we wanted to export this one, I don't know how it would export to GDAU. Honestly, I haven't tried doing static material. I have not tried using displacement materials for GDAU, but this wouldn't work well in Blender. And I believe it's well no I don't think we can do 3D displacement here but yeah this is what you would do if you were making materials for offline rendering because tessellation kind of fell out of favor because it's quite expensive and there are cheaper ways to achieve similar effects that are not as hardcore. So uh we don't generally use the displacement with actual geometry and vertices being pushed in and out. Uh we usually use parallax occlusion mapping which fakes that effect. But of course our silhouette is going to be wrong. And you can see it is pushing in instead of pushing out. But well that's the best we can do. Now we can tone this down a bit with our depth slider. And I will tone it down a bit because it looked ridiculous. H we can also crank it up just for fun. It does look trippy, doesn't it? It's like there's like we're looking for a lens like a looking glass or something. I don't know. Weird. Weird. Let's make it rotate a little bit. And back off with this depth effect. Let's type in one 0.5. 0.15. Okay, let's get rid of this business and let's go back to our brick. Now, every Substance Designer tutorial for brick is going to use slope blur. Let's do that cuz you're going to ask, how do you do slope blur? Well, like this. Okay, I'm going to do the same trick we did before, which is shift rightclick on our output, which inserts a reroute node. By the way, we can right click and we can have a preview in here. Route nodes are cool like that, huh? Let's make it a huge preview. I like huge previews. Huge previews are the best previews, won't you agree? Okay, now slow blur is an interesting effect. It's kind of doing multiple passes of displacement at different um Why am I talking about this? I'm just going to show you. Okay, we need some some noise. So, let's go right click. Now, we can learn another thing while we're at it. So, you can see on the top here, we have a a bunch of things. Drag a node from the list to the slot to add it to the quick access. So, this is a quick access menu that is populated with a bunch of things. That's interesting. And we can drag in different things. Cool. Okay. Let's see what's the first one. Shape. Uhhuh. Noise. FBM. All right. Colorize. Transform. Tyler. Blend. And math. Well, that's all useful things. We're going to use noise FBM. Let's just connect this to the height map of our slope blur. Click on it. And look at that. Well, it's a bit much. So, I'm going to turn down the sigma. Now, if I connect this to our route node, reroute node, you can see our bricks are now kind of wonky, and we generally would like that. Okay, this is not necessarily what you would do in a standard material substance substance designer tutorial. What you would do is something called multi wrap. I mean multi wrap is like a better version of slope blur which can do a bunch of other things. So let's go and do that. So I'm going to connect the same inputs. Now, if we compare, there's an important difference. I'm going to switch this. Wow, look at that. That's nice. This looks like our part of our bricks are just, you know, broken off. Awesome. Let's turn down the intensity to one. Okay, that's low. Maybe two. Cool. Oh, nice. All right. So, how does does this work? And why is it different than slope blur? So slope of blur would be identical if we selected blur mode in multi-warp. I mean it's not identical because the the intensity is different. It seems like it's a little different. Okay, it's not identical. It does look a little different, but it's quite close. So slope blur is kind of like multi-warp in blur mode, but multi-worp has the power of being able to do minimum mode and maximum. Now, it's kind of hard to understand what this is doing, but we're going to make it easier. We're going to use a math node and we'll connect the original input and subtract from it the multi-warp output. So I'm going to change this mode from a + b to a minus b. That's a subtraction. And now you can see. Okay. One more thing. I'm going to duplicate this math node and I'm going to add um absolute. Absolute. Yep. So now this turns negative values into positive values. Cool. Okay. So minimum, you can see the difference here is that we're just chopping things off. Blur is we both chop things off and add things in. And max we are only adding things in. Maybe this isn't the best. Maybe if I did this that would be better. Okay. Yeah. So the difference blur, we are both adding and subtracting. Min, we're just subtracting. And max, we're just adding. Okay, that's kind of weird. This looks cool, though. Um, maybe we can use it somehow. I don't know. All right, so basically minimum is um it's applying warp multiple times and then it's calculating the lowest value. It's like storing the lowest value of every warp. We can do a warp on our own if we go with warp node. So what does warp do? Uh warp we need to change the the epsilon which is the distance of sampling the input the the height map and warp as you can see kind of does similar thing to our slope blur. So how is this even different? Well, the difference is in the corners. You can see warp has our gives us a sharp corner, but slope gives us a blurred one. Now, why? That's because slope blur is well, it's doing warp, but it's doing multiple passes of warp and averaging them together. The cool thing is we can actually recreate that if we go with variation. Iterate iterate variations. Haha. If we connect this here, now we can have up to four different variables that this node can iterate for us and combine the results with a given function. Crazy. Let's go. So, I'm going to change the strength to be dollar question mark one. Look at that. Our iterate variations is giving us something very close to our slope blur. It's just there's more steps. So if you make the steps smaller. There we go. Plus maybe if we increase the resolution. Oh, but now sigma is different. Yeah. Oh, but we're not doing blur. We're doing max. Look, if I do average though, we get almost the same thing as slope blur. There is like minor differences, but it's really it's it's pretty much the same thing. So, you can make your own slope blur and yeah, just add add a buffer after after this. Oh, no, sorry. Iterate buffer is a different thing. Iterate the buffer is an incredible tool, but that's I would call that an advanced thing. So, um, we'll do that in a few tutorials, I think. Um, okay. That's that was supposed to be our first brick. Shoot. Okay. We we've done a bit of um exploration, so we stick to multi-warp in minimum mode. You know, it does them blur. It does the warping multiple times at different strengths and then just keeps the smallest values that that result from this which gives us this effect of our bricks having chipped edges which is perfect. Now there are few things we could improve. One thing is I would like this mortar to be smaller. So I'm going to change the mortar and make it less. I'd like to increase the bevel. I'd like to round the bricks a little bit. So, let's round the bricks. Nice. And I also like to change the color of every brick so it's not the same brick every time. Now, that's going to require us to use the fill. So the fill, if I click on it, maybe I'll reset this center view. The fill contains information about areas, distinct areas in this in this input or on our canvas. If I click and drag, I can connect fill to fill to random gray. or random color. Random gray ploop. Click. Okay, that gives us a different colors for every brick. If I click, left click here to randomize. You can see we have different random patterns. I'm going to just find one that seems most uniform, like least crazy. Okay, this is fine. Okay. So, what I want to do now is change the color of the bricks. So, I'm going to add a blend node. I click and drag. I'm going to click on this and I'll connect this here and this to LBO. Okay, that kind of does what I want, but not not entirely. I like that it changed the color from deep reddish orange to beigy. It's kind of actually kind of nice nice color. The problem is that our bricks are there's like really sharp cutff change in in the between the bricks. We don't like that. We need to make it so that the mortar is uniform color but the brick itself is not. So we need to mask this out somehow. Okay, maybe we can use this. What if I just connect this to our opacity? Oh, look. That just fixed it. Huh? Why? Well, because this is a mask that shows our bricks in white and the mortar in black. If I connect it to opacity, I can even make it 100%. that makes it so our random gray is only mixed or blended in places where this mask is white. Now, if I change our mortar color to blue, so it nicely shows up, you can see there is a smooth transition between the blue and the color of the brick. If I back this off, you can see. Yeah, it's exactly the same thing. I'm going to change this back to neutral gray. And now, so we've masked our bricks to give them different colors. The problem is they're black and white, but we can change the blend mode. Maybe overlay is going to be nice. Just a little bit. Yeah, it's perfect. Some bricks are a bit darker, some bit bricks are a bit lighter. Overlay is a great mix mode. It's kind of like making if the input is lower than the if the background is smaller than layer one, then it acts like addition. No, I don't remember. There's there is some place where there is descriptions for all of them but overlay is basically make it can a neutral gray thing will not change anything. So if I go uniform and I select grayscale if I plug that into layer one I can crank overlay up to a million. Well okay maybe not that high. Okay, I think I'm going to like I'm I'm bumping into um rounding errors, but um you can see that uniform gray which is like sorry uniform gray middle gray.5 gives absolutely no difference at all. The color between these two is not changing. If I plug in the random gray, well, that is changing. So, you can see overlay is a great blending mode. If you have ever painted textures by hand in Photoshop or or CDA, you probably have used overlay blending mode a lot. It's amazing for adding highlights and shadows and altering colors of things. If you just give it black and white, it can vary the brightness while keeping saturation of the colors. So that's great because if we did normal blend mode, that would achieve a similar thing, but it would fade our colors to to to nothing to to desaturated grays, whites and blacks. If I just switch back to overlay, yeah, some of our bricks are black and some of our white, but as soon as we back off, we still have saturation. And if I switch to normal, well, it's all grayish. So, overlay, there are blending modes worth um exploring. Some of them are more crazy than others. Maybe you want a hard mix. I I won't judge. Actually, we could use hard mix here. It kind of does cool things. Make some of the bricks more orange. I like that. That's nice. Okay, you know what? Let's do one more thing and we'll cut it cuz we're already 40 minutes. Let's keep these under an hour. All right, so we have our bricks, but the mortar is kind of uniform. This is really cartoony. Let's try and make it a little bit less cartoony. How can we achieve that? Well, maybe we can make our mortar a little bit grainy like a little like real mortar is. So, let's get some grainy patterns. How can we get that? Okay, right click. Maybe noise. Okay, let's zoom in. Well, if I increase the scale to maximum on both axes. Oh, that's grainy. Okay. Um, okay. I'm going to shift right click again to insert another reroute. Oh, it's funny. It's disconnected it. Um, okay. I'm going to insert a blend. I want to be able to insert. Um, sorry. Now, this blend blends are a default thing. So, it it breaks our stuff. Let's Let's turn it to not zero. So I want to pass this thing to colorize and to opacity. But for depth and normal map, I want this with an extra graininess. Let's put it in here. Um, and actually turn it on. Okay. Well, that's green. All right. Actually, kind of looks good on the bricks, too. But I feel like we need more on our mortar and less on our If we blend this all the way in, it kind of makes everything look flat. That's really, really weird. How about overlay again? Oh, that's interesting. So, now it seems like it's kind of chomping into our bricks and popping out of the mortar. That's really cool. Now, what's going on here is we're basically clipping. So, we are adding bright values to something that's already white and it's being clipped. So, that's why we're losing detail. Uh, in here, it's kind of neat. Actually, looks cool. I think I might keep that. I just want to try one thing, and that's going to be a math node. Let's go click and drag. Bloop. And let's go smooth step. And put this back in. Huh, that's interesting. I'll just have less of that. And I'm going to make this smaller. Um, by the way, you need to keep this uh powers of two unless otherwise it's not going to repeat correct correctly. So, you can see if I do 17, it's like wait, does it it does correctly repeat? What the flick? Something changed. I guess that's might be that that must be new. Okay, we can go 15* 15. All right, so this is actually some cool detail on the bricks, but it's not what I wanted to do. I wanted to do something else. Let's go add another layer. And this is going to blend this pink white gradient, which is the default. Let's disable that. I want more grain. I want a different grain. So, I'm going to add more FBM noise. Let's change the type. Maybe simplex. Cool. Let's go back. No. Okay. Sweet. Random seed. All right. That's really grainy. Let's try that. Okay. Now, I just want this grouch to be um to be sticking out. So, I'm going to select the blending mode to be additive. Oh, that's great. That's good. That's nice. I I'd like to just not be affecting the bricks, though. So, let's do the same thing we did previously with the color changing or variation. And just drag and drop this here to opacity. Now, what does this do? Oh, it makes it so that that only applies to our bricks, of course, because we need to invert this. Okay, so click and drag. Ploop. Invert. Oh, it's Look, it's here. And now I'm plopping this here. Okay, that does what we expected it to. Let's move these things back so we have a little bit more cleaner view. Okay. And I would say this is a brick. All right. Not the prettiest one, but if it's your first brick, that's not a bad one. Yeah, let's call it a day. Thank you for watching. I hope you've learned something. If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave them in the comment section below. If you want me to make more, you can help me by donating money. Uh, you can find me on Patreon, patreon.com or on Libraay, libape.com or on coffee co-fe.comorg/adalpha0000 or you can just go to my website anfaxyz and find all the links there. Or you can just enjoy your life. Hopefully you do. Peace.