Shader Magic In Blender (Ver 3.41 And Above)

More than just creating shapes! It's also about all the common techniques used in games!

What you'll learn

The most common shader techniques used in games and some Blende specific things.

How to work with the Blender Shader nodes

How to create procedural shapes from scratch in Blender

How Vector Math is working when creating Shaders.

Requirements

You should know how to handle basic tasks in Blender and have some knowledge of the Shader Editor.

Description

Are you one of those that think that nodes look scary when you see a big node tree…or perhaps you are just curious how the water in a game can flow so nicely around those rocks in the river and follow the stream perfectly?Regardless the reason, here is where you will learn more on how to connect those nodes!I will go through how to create shapes, how Vector math works (like cross and dot product, Face forward, snap,…) and all the common techniques used in games like vertex painting, flowmap, parallax mapping, using a texture atlas/sprite sheet, Sobel (Edge detection on textures), trimsheet and so on.I will also cover more "Blender specific" stuff like finding the edges on models, how to create scratches and dirt, creating procedural patterns using the radial gradient among other things.You might wonder why in Blender and not in Unreal Engine or Unity? Well, why not? Most things taught in the course can be used with only small adaptions in game engines as well. However, since we don't have all the whistles and extra stuff in Blender…you as a student are forced to learn the basics without cheating ;). I know from my own experience that it is a good path to walk if you really want to know how all things are put together.The teacher you will get, me, has more than 10 years of experience of Blender, is educated as Technical Artist in one of the highest ranked 3D schools in the World; "The Game Assembly" and are currently working as a Technical Artist for the game "Midnight Ghost Hunt" in a Swedish Game Studio.NB! You will however NOT learn about how to create realistic and nice materials. Those topics I cover in my course "Become a Material Guru in Blender". This course is Shader Magic.. not material magic :D.

Overview

Section 1: Introduction

Lecture 1 Introduction

Lecture 2 The Setting

Lecture 3 The resources!!

Section 2: The base to create shaders

Lecture 4 Texture Coordinate

Lecture 5 Basic Masking

Lecture 6 We create a tile!

Lecture 7 We transform one tile in to many tiles.

Lecture 8 Time to clean up the tile a bit.

Lecture 9 How you create a nodegroup

Lecture 10 Using the Vector math node "Length"

Lecture 11 Repetition of the base

Section 3: The Built in Textures in Blender

Lecture 12 Brick Texture

Lecture 13 Checker Texture

Lecture 14 Environment Texture

Lecture 15 Gradient Texture

Lecture 16 IES Texture

Lecture 17 Image Texture

Lecture 18 Magic Texture

Lecture 19 Musgrave Texture

Lecture 20 Noise Texture

Lecture 21 Voronoi Texture

Lecture 22 Wave Texture

Lecture 23 White Noise Texture

Lecture 24 Explaining the dimensions on textures

Section 4: Create Shapes from Math

Lecture 25 Visualize math with graphs

Lecture 26 Using the Compare Node to check the value of UV

Lecture 27 How to use X and Y more than once to increase amount of possible shapes.

Lecture 28 Introducing the node "Power"

Lecture 29 Making a "heart" with only math nodes

Lecture 30 Making the "spade" shape from cards by using the "heart" shape.

Lecture 31 Let's make the rest of the shapes from a deck of cards

Lecture 32 Shape things using Vector curves

Lecture 33 How to add a second border pattern on a floor

Lecture 34 Examples using Power node a bit more

Lecture 35 Blending Mortar and tiles together on the tiles we created in the base session

Lecture 36 Setting bounds or borders on your UV and merging UV Together

Section 5: Practice making shapes

Lecture 37 Create a smiley

Lecture 38 Create a red cross

Lecture 39 Create a cylinder shaped pill

Lecture 40 Copy a floor tile pattern (circle shapes)

Lecture 41 Copy a floor tile pattern again (handling gray scale)

Section 6: Common Techniques used in games

Lecture 42 Blend textures using a second texture

Lecture 43 Blend textures together using Vertex Color

Lecture 44 Introduction to Vector Math Normal and "Dot Product"

Lecture 45 Using Dot Product as Fresnel effect

Lecture 46 Using Dot Product together with Normal Maps

Lecture 47 How to use the "Cross Product"

Lecture 48 What is the vector node "Snap"?

Lecture 49 How to use "Face Forward"

Lecture 50 Using "Vector Rotate"

Lecture 51 Rotating our tiles

Lecture 52 Example on creating scratches

Lecture 53 How to find edges and add dirt

Lecture 54 Take a look at Vector Bump

Lecture 55 Using Trim sheets

Lecture 56 Using Sprite Sheets

Lecture 57 Using Flow maps

Lecture 58 Learning about Parallax mapping

Lecture 59 Randomizing tiles from an atlas

Lecture 60 Finding edges on a 2D Texture

Lecture 61 Introduction to using "Radial"

Lecture 62 Using "Radials" to create polygons

Lecture 63 Using UV to create simple VFX

Lecture 64 Creating Index to tiles on a UV

Lecture 65 A deeper example of tile math

Lecture 66 How to UV Offset to create things like wooden planks

This is for all that want to go deeper in to the techniques used by Technical Artists in games to create shaders.