Sand Shader - Advanced Materials - Episode 14

[@RCTommy]

Wait... This is exactly what I was looking for today, and then I realised... You've just posted this video! Awesome!

[@ErikBorchersVR]

Wow Ben! This is incredible. Thank you for showing and explaining the texture packing of going from 4 samples to 1.

[@AlekMadeDis]

And if we combine with, what we learned from Snow material. We can add little sparkling effect for it when directional light is shining towards camera )

[@manonthedollar]

That was a great little hack!

[@pavelnikitchenko5018]

Hi Ben! Thanks for the great tutorial. I think you can optimize this material more and don't use second texture: Put noise in the alpha channel of the first texture and then append Alpha of two texture samples (one shifted by 0.5).

[@threedai]

Excellent topic, and with the possibility to optimize it !!

[@Kiwi2703]

Thank you for the tutorial! Could you also make one to show how to make other desert/sand effects in addition to this shader? For example wind blowing sand from the tips of dunes etc.

[@BenCloward]

That’s a good idea but I’m not an expert at particle effects, so it’s probably better if someone else makes that one.

[@blastforge]

You could add a noise texture and use the panner node to move that texture across the surface, multiply this with a slightly brighter colour than your original sand base colour and add it to the previous base colour. This will create some nice additional motion :) For a more complex result, multiply 2 noises together at different panning speeds to create one that appears to morph and change. Depending on the difference of speeds you will get slow or fast motion in the noise. These are just 2D effects however on the surface material :)

[@hantergidi]

@@BenClowardan you please show the unity part slowly step by step? Thanks

[@impheris]

this channel is gold

[@shakaama]

oh my god Ben, thank you so much. I love you bro.

[@MZONE3D]

thankyou... it would also be cool to have another video on a simplified animated blowing sand to go above the base sand layer?

[@blastforge]

You could add a noise texture and use the panner node to move that texture across the surface, multiply this with a slightly brighter colour than your original sand base colour and add it to the previous base colour. This will create some nice additional motion :) For a more complex result, multiply 2 noises together at different panning speeds to create one that appears to morph and change. Depending on the difference of speeds you will get slow or fast motion in the noise. These are just 2D effects however on the surface material :)

[@ultracapitalistutopia3550]

About the x*2-1 to remap the x from [0,1] to [-1,1], in UE you can use the Constant Bias node which just do (x+a)*b. So in this case a = -0.5 and b = 2. It just make the graph looks neater especially if you remap values alot in the material.

[@BenCloward]

One node instead of two. Ok, I'll do it! Thank you!

[@manonthedollar]

4:38 : Instead of blurring the image, you can increase the sample size of your eyedropper which will essentially do the same thing for you.

[@medmel2160]

I was waiting for this one, super excited It's cool you go around with the mannequin. It makes the scale easier to understand. There is an effect I'm thinking about with desert sand, when you look at the sand head touching the sand, you can see the ground is reflecting very much as if there was water. How to achieve such effect, a simple fresnel? Thanks!

[@matteckenrodt]

maybe a fesnel combined with anisotropy which he has a tutorial on

[@medmel2160]

@@matteckenrodt thanks for your idea, I'll try it

[@matteckenrodt]

@@medmel2160 come back here if it works! I'd love to know how you set it up

[@medmel2160]

@@matteckenrodt will do!

[@OMarceloMarquesDeOliveira]

Adding a parallax occlusion to this material would be perfect.

[@preston7036]

Hi, could you create tutorial about how to make translucent ice which blending with water?( by vertex paint )

[@r0mbag-art]

Your videos are invaluable. Thank you for posting them!

[@brucediaz97]

Sorry if this has little to do with the video itself but I really wanted to thank you for your work in Robotech: Invasion, its one of my favourite games of all time! I hope you continue to create awesome content!

[@BenCloward]

Hah! You're welcome! Lots of crunch time on that one - but it was a fun challenge to figure out how to make the cyclone armor transform correctly.

[@brucediaz97]

@@BenCloward I bet! Ended up looking amazing. Is there any chance you could make a video talking about it?

[@gossalex]

laughed a lot in this one Ben.

[@eneg4771]

Can you share your file, I still don't understand a lot of things

[@ji_-to2478]

Thank you so much for all the effort you put into these videos, they're super helpful.

[@dannys_85]

Ben you are the best thank you.

[@mahboobalavi4193]

how can i find GLSL shaders tutorial ?

[@tylergorzney8499]

Instead of using the Blend overlay which uses several If nodes (expensive yes/no?), I multiplied thetint map by 2 an then multiplied that by the tint color. I get ALMOST the exact same result. Blend overlay produces slightly better "white" values, where my method the white values have more color tint to them. Curious what your thoughts are on this? Am i really not saving much performance?

[@blastforge]

Hi Ben, this is great however when you do math, such as on the red channel of the noise, you could right click and "Start Previewing Node" to show the effect to the viewer isolated from the other channels. This might help with certain things such as power. :)

[@DavidWKimber]

Invaluable!

[@savagersmovies4526]

Hi Ben, I am quite new in Shaders (i have only some experience from Blender node editor). I woud like to learn shaders from basics. So my question is: Which your series of videos should i watch first, the older UE4 Materials or Shader Basics or other? Thanks for your recommandation :)

[@cmitchell6927]

Let's go!

[@ONe-yw1eh]

Thank you

[@tranceemerson8325]

I feel like sand sometimes has some really shiny specks that glitter in the sunlight.

[@blastforge]

You could use one of the channels in the noise and power it heavily to reduce the overall values of anything under 1. You should have a very dark texture except some white specks, you could then ADD this to your roughness channel to have some very shiny flecks in the roughness to help achieve this result. You can use Right Click on the Power node and Start Previewing Node to dial in the power setting

[@miloszgierczak4806]

Hey Ben! Thank you for another video!!!

[@DangAllen]

Learned much from you, thank you!

[@antoniosuarez7881]

thanks, grate tutorial

[@archiblage]

Great toturial, but excuse my ignorance, I still do not understand why splitting the texture map into two layers is optimization

[@BenCloward]

Very large, low frequency detail doesn't require a lot of texture resolution - but it looks blurry. Very high frequency detail does require a lot of texture resolution. If you use one texture that has both low and high frequency detail, you need to use a very large texture to accommodate the needs of both of them - like maybe 2k. But if you put all of the high frequency detail in a separate texture, you can make that texture smaller (like maybe 256) and tile it several times. You can also make the low frequency detail texture smaller - like maybe 512. So the two textures are just 512 + 256 instead of 2k and the result is very similar but using ~1/8th of the texture memory. Does that help?

[@archiblage]

@@BenCloward understood, thank you so much

[@Sav3D]

Looks like Unity does the inverted green channel unlike Unreal

[@BenCloward]

Yes, that's correct. Unity is Y positive and Unreal is Y negative.

[@krz9000]

The average filter in photoshop is THE BEST to get that one colorvalue if we only can afford one colorvalue😉

[@furkannarin2844]

Why not use the mask component instead of doing all the math for retrieving the first normal map in unreal?

[@LakiLOOP]

Blur - > Average

[@junglingmitapfel2902]

Anakin Skywalker does not approve it!

[@BenCloward]

😆