Bringing out the 'Wow' Factor in your 3D Ship: Texturing, Materials, Lighting and Compositing

[3DShipWright]

Topic Opener:

 

My favorite Blender tutorial vlogger, Andrew Price, once said [paraphrased] "Google the words 'Blender + Car' and I bet you'll find over 1,000 videos on how to model a 3D car, but not one video on how to present that model."

Now, I recognize and respect that my audience for this topic may be pretty niche - after all, to the vast majority of members here, the only function of 3D software in ship modelling is drafting usable plans or exporting datasets for 3D printing parts. I'd wager that the notion of a 3D ship model as the final output instead of an input is a foreign or uninteresting concept to many, but I have gotten a few requests to cover texturing and materials, so here we are. 

 

With that in mind, I'd like to formally introduce this topic as a way to help one another breathe life into our digital ship models and to be able to display them as evocative artwork in still renders, movie clips or video games. 

 

Here's my agenda and I hope to do one section/week. I'm also happy to focus more on certain topics or skip over others based upon your feedback:

 

1. Understanding PBR (and why it matters)

2. To Plank or not to Plank - Which technique is really more accurate?

3. UV magic: It's all about that scale,

4. Avoiding the Pitfalls: reverse color grading

5. Avoiding the Pitfalls: use of color palettes

6. Cliche's to Live By

7. Special Effects and Overlays

 

We'll dive in soon gang,

-Nate

 

[3DShipWright]

A few definitions to start things off. This is a public forum, and in practice many experienced CG artists will use these terms interchangeably, which is fine because we can usually infer the correct terminology from context. I want give precise definitions upfront so any replies to this topic don't inadvertently confuse someone who is trying to learn for the first time. And if you are new to this, DON'T WORRY - it's not as complex as it may initially seem. I promise.

 

Texturing: The art of overlaying materials onto the mesh of your model so that it looks like it's actually made of real-world substances

 

Material: A 3D simulation of a substance that exists in real life such as wood, metal, fabric, etc. In a 3d application such as blender, the term 'Material encompasses the entire node set-up including textures, operators, and shaders.

 

Physics Based Rendering (PBR) Materials: A Physics Based Rendering, or 'PBR' material is generally understood to be any material that is contains more than just color data. The foundation for any PBR material is a related set of textures.

 

Screenshot #1: A set of PBR Textures from the textures.com website.

 

Texture: a 2-dimensional image file (.jpg, png, .tga) that contains some sort of light-based physics information. Most texture files begin as actual photographs taken with a camera. Multiple copies of the photo are made, and each is edited differently to serve a unique purpose in the 3D application. Once imported into the 3D software they are once again combined and processed through a shader, at which point the rendering engine can interpret the data to simulate color, ambient occlusion, roughness, specular, displacement, transparency, translucency, emission, and much more. The thing that all of those have in common is they are all real-world properties/behaviors of light. 

 

Shader: A 'hub' node which allows the input of various textures and/or values of certain properties, then combines and calculates the results of the overall material

 

Screenshot #2: The Principled Shader in Blender. Note all the different properties that can be edited. We can set these values manually or import and hookup our PBR textures to the shader. In many cases, the name of the texture file will match its corresponding input on the shader (compare screenshot #1 to screenshot #2). For example, the 'normal' texture file maps to 'normal' input on the shader, and same goes for the 'roughness' and 'metallic' files. If the name doesn't match, for example, the 'albedo' or 'height' files - there's usually a good reason, such as they require an operator between the texture and the shader, or we have a choice on how we use those files (For the experienced folks - I'm talking about displacement vs. bump mapping here)

 

 

Node: A visualization of any component of a material (i.e. texture, operator, shader) and the relations to other components inputs and outputs.

 

Screenshot #2: Any 'box' in the screenshot below is considered a node.

 

 

Okay! With then definitions out of the way, let's create some materials for our ship...