Shadowing Practice: Blender Tutorial: Photorealistic Puddles - Learn English Speaking with Video

Anyone could make a lazy puddle using a noise texture.

But if you want to make a photorealistic puddle shader that matches the three states of dry, wet, and pooled water, then this is the video for you.

By the end of this tutorial, you'll have made your very own handy, easy-to-use node group that will add realistic puddles to any material you want in the future.

So let's go.

So to kick things off, I've got a plane, which I have enlarged to be 20 by 20 meters, so it's nice and big.

And now we need a texture set.

Doesn't matter which texture set, it'll really work on anything, provided you have a base color, roughness, normal map, and displacement map.

Those four maps is all you'll need.

So I'm going to be using the Polygon add-on, which I'll put a link for it in the description.

But basically it lets you browse, download, and automatically import any material that you want.

So the one I'm looking for is this one right here, just this kind of like yellow cobblestone-y looking paver.

Quite common in, I don't know, a lot of parts of the world I've seen it.

But I'll also throw up on the screen here some different other materials which you might want to use, and I'll put the links for those in the description as well.

So if I go to my material preview, I should see that, look at that, we've got the cobblestone applied to everything.

Great.

So now the rework inside of our shading tab.

Yeah, we're going to get complex with some nodes.

Now, first of all, the add-on has added in our texture set for us, but it does look complex.

Really, all it's done is it's put everything inside of this node group

so that we can just easily change a few handy values if we want them.

But really, all you need to know is it's just got the usual texture maps, and it's coming out of base color, alpha, normal, all that kind of stuff.

Now, we don't need most of this because most of it isn't relevant to this material.

So I'm going to disconnect all the stuff except base color, roughness, and normal map, right?

We will use height later on, but for now, just these three to play with.

So that's our material.

Okay, looking bland, but it does work.

So anyone who knows their way around a shader will know that if you want to make something look wet, you really just drop the roughness amount.

The roughness is the sharpness of the reflection, and so the sharper the reflection, the wetter it tends to look.

And the higher the roughness amount, obviously the opposite, it looks more dull and more matte and bone dry, right?

So a zero to a one is the difference between a puddle and a non-puddle, right?

So those who know what they're doing will think, aha, I know of a procedural texture which will generate zeros and ones across a surface,

and that is your noise texture.

So if you add in this and you put this into your roughness input here, you will see this.

Okay, so to just quickly preview just that by itself, it's blacks to whites, right?

As a sort of general randomness across the surface, which when you put into roughness, you can see it gets you this effect, which is kind of there.

Like we've got a puddle sort of look effect, but it's very vague.

And that's because it needs more contrast.

but more importantly we have lost our roughness input from our texture set

so we don't want to override it we don't want to just like completely remove the information from

that we want to use this noise texture as a mask for the roughness map

that our texture set already has if that makes sense

so essentially i'm going to put this up here and then in here i'm going to add in color

mix color and I'm going to drop this in right here

and now with this noise texture I'm going to put

that into my factor input here and then my roughness I'm going to put into my a slot

so with this what this is doing is the white values is it's going to be using now

because it's in the factor it's going to be using whatever's in a

and then the b is going to be whatever is the black values

so for that because roughness right we're thinking of like a puddle right puddle is

it's going to have like wet looking reflections where it is a black value.

That was a terrible way of explaining that.

But essentially wherever I want there to be a puddle, I want the roughness to be zero, which means I want my alpha to be black like so.

And there we go.

So now I've got basically the same effect, but I have retained all that roughness information, which was in the roughness map.

Okay.

So now let's add some contrast because this looks very vague.

It looks like it's just been sprayed with a mist or something.

So to add in contrast, I mean, you've got like a brightness and contrast node, which I don't think I've ever used because it's just so bad and you can't understand what it's doing.

A lot of people like to use the color ramp node, right?

You would drop this in here and then you could like, you know, adjust these values.

And yes, that is helpful, but it's also like, it's very visual, but you also don't really know what it's doing with the values necessarily.

And it also has sliders, which aren't helpful

if you want to be able to easily adjust something later

in my opinion the much better one is the map range node

which does exactly what a color ramp node does

but it does it with values

that you can change by um by a slider basically it

makes it a lot more friendlier for a node setup

which we'll get to later on now with this this maximum

amount here is basically now going to become my wetness value

if i set this all the anything below zero that's the

original like roughness right it's just using 100% the original texture

and then as I increase this it's generally adding in sorry

genuinely gradually it's gradually adding in a wet amount to it

so this is just a really nice easy way to just quickly add puddles to something

and we're going to use this map range into everything that we use for the rest of this shader.

So it's all going to be nice and procedural and we're going to know what we're doing.

All right.

So it's looking okay, but it kind of has this feeling like, it's not like puddles are forming.

It looks like someone's just hosed it very recently with water.

And the reason for that is the bump.

If we look at reference photos of puddles, not surprisingly, where there is a puddle where the water has formed so much that it has pooled,

you're not able to see the texture of of the road or the cobblestone underneath it.

You are able to see obviously the texture around it, but where there is a puddle, it's water.

So it is glass, it is completely flat, right?

So what's causing the bump, what's giving us the bump is this normal right here So if I was to just like remove that then yes, it does look more like a puddle right here

But it doesn't look good because we've lost all of the bump information

Which is giving us so much character to the original material so we do need that bump information

So essentially what I want to do is just like what I've done here creating using a mask to

keep my original map value, but tweak it, I'm going to do the same thing down here.

So I'm going to duplicate my mix color node here, shift D, drag that down, and then making sure my normal goes into my A input,

I'm then going to take my map range output and then put that into the factor input.

Okay.

Now we can see something is happening, but probably not what we want.

We've got the bump everywhere else, which is what we want nice and untouched

But where we have got our puddle where the puddle should be forming We've got an error

And the reason for that is

that this input for our principled shader is a very special input

That purple one means it's looking for vector data So vector data is an R, G, and a B which has been converted into an X, Y, and a Z Very technical,

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I know But that information is what it is looking for And the black color, this one here, which is where it's going to put anything that is a white value, right?

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This white part of our cloud noise texture is being turned into black.

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And it doesn't know what to do with that.

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So essentially, instead of a black color, we need to use a color that the vector part of the shader can understand.

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And that color is blue.

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100% blue, no red, no green.

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and when you do that, it says, yep, this surface is pointing directly upwards, it's flat and it now works correctly everywhere.

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We've still got the bump everywhere else but wherever there's a puddle, it's now working correctly.

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Now, if this is not working for you, if you've got something that looks really weird, like, I don't know, like something like this where it kind of looks like screwed up in some way,

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it's probably because you haven't got vector information going into your mix node, you've instead got color information.

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So what you're not seeing inside of this node group here, what the polygon add-on did is it added in a normal map, then it put it into the normal map here,

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which then gives it this, you see this blue output, right?

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Sorry, blue or purple.

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Purple, purple, then it goes into here.

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If you had your normal map here, the normal map node, it would not work correctly.

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So make sure that this goes after your normal map node, wherever that is, not before it.

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Otherwise, it won't work correctly.

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so you can be proud if you've made it this far

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because you've got something that looks pretty close to puddles

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and certainly a lot further than anyone else has made it

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and you've got a very nice system that works with just one single slider

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which is great but we can do better it is missing one critical component of puddles

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that is why this doesn't look quite right

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and that reason is it's all explained by this slide right the difference between a surface

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that is dry and a surface

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that is wet is a difference in the color value right it is noticeably dark darker

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when something is wet and you can see this on every surface right

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so really a puddle is kind of like three stages you've got the dry you've got the lightly wet

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and then you've got the pooling, right?

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And right now, all we've got is just almost like everything is completely wet, and we've got pooling, and that's it.

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But we need this stark difference.

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Now, what is actually causing that, by the way, if you were curious, is that even though it's not a pool, right, there is a thin coating over this patch of concrete here.

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So inside the grooves of that, there's a little bit of water, and it means that when the light enters that surface, instead of bouncing into it,

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getting the color information and then exiting out into your eye, some of it is actually bouncing inside of this little miniature like layer of water,

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and then it's bouncing back into itself.

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So because that happens enough, some of that light goes back into it and then it appears darker to your eye.

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And that is why everywhere where there is a, yeah, basically like, that's why you have that.

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Like part of the stone is dark and part of it is light.

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So how do we do that?

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Well, we're going to use our, basically the exact same method that we've used for these two.

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So I'm going to take my mix roughness here.

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I'm going to duplicate it and I'm going to drag it up here just so that that lines up with this.

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And this is connected it for me exactly the way I want it.

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My base color, I want to go in here

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and then I'm going to take my map range and I'm going to put that into here.

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So essentially I am now tweaking my, uh, my yellow cobblestone, it's going into here,

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and then this value here is going to be wherever there is a puddle.

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So it's currently black, which is why it looks like someone has spilled oil all over the surface.

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So I don't want it to be completely black.

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I want it to be somewhere in the middle, right?

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So if I was to adjust my value here, I would want something like this, but this isn't right.

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So the reason it's not right is this is set to mix.

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So instead I want to make it multiply so that it ignores all of the white, the light values, and just use the dark values from this.

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So this now basically becomes, you know, how dark do I want the wet part of my surface, right?

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So we can just leave it somewhere here for now.

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And this looks somewhat better.

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Like you look at it, it's like, yeah, it's kind of right.

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Like, okay, now when it's completely dry, it's light.

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And then when it gets darker, it is dark, but something's still not right about it, right?

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Kind of in a big way.

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And the reason for that is going back to our reference, because reference is king, reference, reference, reference.

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I'm going to sell that shirt one day.

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It's binary, right?

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You can see there's no gradient here.

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It's not like it's getting darker towards the middle there.

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It is either bone dry or it is dark because it is wet.

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Okay.

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And you sometimes see where it looks like darker in the middle of a puddle.

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That's usually where like sediment is pooled.

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And that's a completely different thing where it's like muddy.

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But in most cases, no, like it's just, it's either completely wet or it is completely dry and that's it.

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So what we need to do is between here and here, we need to add something to basically do like a hard cut, a binary cut.

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You could actually create a separate map range node, but since we're not going to be tweaking this value, it's actually easier to use the more visual version of this I mentioned before,

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the color ramp node.

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So if I drag this in here, again, making sure it's going between our map range just into here, not affecting these down here.

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This, as you can, you know, as you probably know you can tweak this and you can adjust

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which parts of it will affect where we want it to be binary

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so the trick is to change it from the linear blend type to instead be a uh constant

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is it a blend type maybe it's just interpret interpolation

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but you can see that now we've got we've got exactly

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that it's either wet or it is dry it is nowhere in between and that is pretty much what we want, but it looks terrible.

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It looks really, really bad.

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Okay.

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So why is that?

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It's got the correct effect, but it looks terrible.

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If we go back to our reference here, you will see that, yes, you've got, you know, parts of the brick here, which are black and then parts that are white,

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but it's not a completely clear like line, right?

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This looks like it was drawn with like, I don't know, like cut out of paper, like clip art, vector art or something, completely clear line.

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That's not the way it works in the real world because real bricks and cobblestone and asphalt as well, if you were just using like it for like a car park texture or something, right?

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The line is jagged and it changes depending on the height of the material that is underneath it.

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So these bricks are higher than the grout.

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So the grout is where you're getting this pooling effect.

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And the bricks that are individually lower than the others, those are darker because that's where water, like it hasn't dried from that section yet.

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And then you've got some bricks which are like higher than others.

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So they're like sticking out of it and they're high and dry, right?

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So that information is very relevant.

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We need that information on here.

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So we need this texture to somehow tweak, to somehow tweak this, right?

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So between actually, between the map range and in here, we need to use part of our texture.

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Okay.

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So this is why I said that the texture set that you need, you need to have base color, roughness, normal, which we've used and height information, which is what I've got coming out of this material.

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So if you've been using materials from elsewhere, it would just be your displacement node, which is just basically black and white information,

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which by the way, the polygon add-on will automatically, by default, it'll set your displacement strength to zero.

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So if you want to see it, you just turn it to one and now you've got this information here so we need to use this information because

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This has got the information of the grout is like a lot like it's dark

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because it is low a lower height And then you've got some brick which is lighter than others,

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which means it's higher than other brick So now we know what information we need to use.

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We know where to put it How do we make one influence the other and this is the trick?

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something that you learned

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if you watched my abandoned house tutorial whichever direction it is

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up there i talked about how you can infuse two values together

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so the way that you do it is by adding in a mix color node

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so basically same one as there right adding this in

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and i'm going to take my height

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and i'm going to put this into my bottom input down here

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so my noise texture this is before it goes into the map range

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because i want to use just like the gray values and i'll I'll tell you why in a sec, before it goes and gets like contrasted.

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So my grayish looking values here, my grayish looking values here, and it's gonna go in here.

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And the trick to get them to influence each other is to use not the mix blend type, but the overlay blend type.

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Now in my old like abandoned house tutorial, I mentioned like color burn was the one.

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I think maybe I didn't understand the math correctly.

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And I thought like, ah, it just looks punchier and it looks nice.

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I think actually the correct one is overlay.

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It's more standard.

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I don't actually know how they change.

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That might actually probably be like a fun quiz for like artists out there.

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Like what is the difference between multiply and subtract?

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What is the difference between screen and add?

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And like, see how many can get it correct.

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I bet you like 99.99% could tell the difference between overlay and color bone.

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I guarantee like nobody knows.

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I know there's a difference, but anyways.

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Point is with this, if I now go back to here, you can see that it's now correctly working, right?

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And this value here is now tweaking how much influence.

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This is so cool.

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This factor amount becomes our influence value of how much it is influencing that blend between the noise texture and the brick,

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which is so cool.

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Now, the more astute of you might notice, that's wrong, Andrew.

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It's seemingly doing the opposite.

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Where the grout is, it's making it look dry.

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And where the bricks are, it's making it look wet.

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So basically this value here needs to be inverted between the height and the B.

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Now, normally I would use like an invert, but actually I need to do another operation on it as well.

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So I'm gonna use a map range node and I'm gonna drop this in here.

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And just to invert this, I'm setting my min to one and my max to zero.

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And now it is working correctly.

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And look at that.

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So those lines now become darker, right? which is so cool, just automatically looks correct.

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This is how you get realistic materials.

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You study reference really, really hard, trying to fix everything until it looks right.

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And then it eventually does and you go, aha.

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So it's now working correctly.

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Now, if you're not using polygon textures, you don't need to worry about this next part, but something that we have just realized, we tried to standardize it to work across shaders.

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And it meant that our displacement values had to be between 0.4 and 0.6 in range, which is why this looks very gray looking, not a lot of contrast there.

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We are actually gonna be remastering it later this year, all of our textures.

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But basically it means because of that, we got a lot of gray range that could be normalized and this map range will do it.

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Just means basically you're gonna set from 0.4, which is when the detail actually starts to 0.6.

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And it will mean it will go from that to this and it will actually then look correct.

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And it means that you're, it just means you'll have more range here to play with essentially. So now

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that this looks correct you can see the whole picture changes it looks way way different um it looks just

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so much more realistic

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because this is what cobblestone does right it's not like everything

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is just coated in water right you have like bricks individual bricks it's like like lego pattern across everything

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which is really cool and you can see that as i change this it's almost like a really cool transition, right?

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Of like water buildup across the surface.

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It's really, really cool.

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And you'll see a similar effect when you're using it on like a different texture and asphalt or something.

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It's just, this is a cobblestone, it's more noticeable, but you will have the effect of the height influence,

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the height information influencing where the puddle actually begins and ends.

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Couple of quick things to improve this.

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So first of all, if you were just trying to go for like, you know, everything needs to be like relatively wet, like a wet car park or something, you might not like these dry patches,

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which case you would just adjust this slider here until you like don't see them

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or you only see like a few or something.

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But this is generally where if you want, I don't know, it's like it's getting drier, right?

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Or like the effect, like the spread really of that, that wet mask is kind of, yeah, just being changed.

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The other thing is that this, the scale of this will obviously change the size of your puddles and how often they appear.

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You can also change to 4D mode and it'll just add this W value at the top.

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And the only difference there is that this is now seed.

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So if you don't happen to like the particular arrangement that you've got, you could change the seed and try and get a different amount of puddles.

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The other thing that you might wanna do is to, because I noticed looking at reference that like puddles rarely actually form like uniformly, like even in a car park or something flat,

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like there's generally parts of the car park where it's like lower.

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So you'll have like a lot of puddles there and then less elsewhere.

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So I kind of wanted to like paint, I want the ability to paint in.

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So you could add in like an image texture and paint this way.

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I actually prefer to use vertex paint.

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So the way I would do that is just hold down control and tab, move up to vertex paint.

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And when you do that, it will have automatically added over here in your color attributes.

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You've got a vertex paint attribute called col, C-O-L.

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Great name, which just means if you go shift A input attributes, you should see one here that says coal,

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and then I can blend the two of these together.

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So I'm going to take my mix color right in here.

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I'll make this like my, oh God, it's all screwing up.

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I'll make, okay, first of all, let's do the painting on this.

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So first of all, you need everything to be black.

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So hit X until the black value is at the front there on the left, then hit shift K.

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It's weird because you can't see anything that's happening, but you just have to assume, yep, now it's working.

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Shift K, everything is black, it's filled.

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And now with my white brush, so white is on the left, so hit X to swap, I could paint.

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Now I can't paint because I've only got four vertices.

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So this is vertex paint, so you need more vertices.

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So that's the downside of this method is that you do actually need vertices, but the upside is that you don't have to worry about UV mapping and like image texturing.

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And then if you change your mesh, you have to like redo all of your, your, your painting or whatever.

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Like I just hate working with blenders texture painter, but this is a lot easier.

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So now with this, I can just paint in using, you know, my brush of wherever it is that I want my puddles to appear, right?

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Go back into object mode.

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This now is going to go into here.

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So this is my top.

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This is now going to go into my bottom like this

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and then this value here I want to be set to multiply

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so it's basically all the way to the left is using just the mask by itself

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and then as I gradually increase multiply it's adding in this noise texture

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because while you could use just the uh the painted map

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that you did by yourself um I find

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that without it it just looks oh god I hate the eevee thing

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but it just looks like really like it just looks just

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looks nasty it looks like it's just been painted right because it has been painted.

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So this just adds in a little bit of variation and it just helps it look a lot nicer.

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You can also use like a lower strength amount so that you can just like more subtly paint in certain areas.

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And then you can get something that feels a little bit more realistic to like, yeah, this is like the low part of the town square where,

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you know, the contractor who built it was a little dodgy and he didn't level the surface.

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And so you've got like a build up of a buildup of puddles, right?

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But it's, it's more realistic, right?

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Because that's how puddles appear.

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They generally appear in like one place.

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It's not generally over everything uniformly.

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And that's basically it.

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If I want to make this like a nice user-friendly tool that I will want to use again and again,

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I'm going to hit control G and now I've got a node group here, right?

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I've got all going into one.

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It's all coming out correctly.

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And the most important thing is I would go in here with this map range and I would take this, drag this out over here, and then where it's got the group name,

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I would call this wetness, right?

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And I've just reordered these just so that I'm easy to understand.

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Wetness is the key value, right?

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That's the one where I'm getting most of the control of how my puddles are going to look.

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And it's just one slider.

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It's nice and easy.

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It's artist friendly.

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It's very easy to adjust.

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I mean, if you wanted to, you could also throw in like, you know, how much of the color, sorry, the noise influence, you could drag that in there.

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You could also, I don't know, have like the seed value from your clouds or your puddles if you wanted to.

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It's really up to you.

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However, user-friendly you want to make it.

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And I'd probably also relabel this color roughness and normal as well.

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But then I've got a little puddle group and I can add

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that to my future shaders and it's easy to use and it's really fun.

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If you want to download the finished node group, I've put a link in the description so you can get that,

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along with some links to several other photo scanned like concretes and asphalts and things that work really great with this shader.

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And yeah, if you enjoyed this video, hit like and subscribe so that other people can find it.

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And thank you for watching.

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I'll see you in another video.

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Gramática en este vídeo

Las estructuras que más usa el hablante, con las palabras exactas del vídeo:

Estructura	En el vídeo
Present perfect have/has + participio pasado — una acción pasada que sigue importando ahora	have made · have enlarged · I've seen
Voz pasiva be + participio pasado — importa lo que ocurre, no quién lo hace	been sprayed · has been converted · being turned
Oraciones de relativo who / which + oración — información extra sobre una persona o cosa	anyone who knows · those who know · effect, which is

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Native popovers with smooth animations (no JS required)

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¿Qué es la Técnica de Shadowing?