ONE SHADER TO RULE!
What is it?
One Shader to Rule is a material setup and workflow to allow you to quickly create stunning and memory optimized photoreal materials for Blender 2.8 and EEVEE.
How do I use it?
You need to download the .blend file and watch the video-- it will explain EVERYTHING!
CHECK OUT THE YOUTUBE VIDEO TO LEARN MORE!
Hey, what’s up guys, Chipp Walters here with another Blender 2.8 freebie. And this one is especially interesting for those of you wanting to create photoreal renderings and animations in EEVEE.
So, the simple fact is the workflow to create great materials for EEVEE is difficult to say the least. If you want to do procedural textures, you need to have a university mathematics degree with a minor in computer science. Not to mention many of the final textures look just too perfect. Personally, I can often spot poor procedural textures a mile away. They just look computer generated.
So, I’ve always relied on my trusty ability to use my smartphone and my favorite tiling software, PixPlant, to create real photo tileable textures. Nothing beat photos. Period.
We’ve all seen the super high quality textures, like those on Textures.com and elsewhere, which are beautiful and render photographically BUT these need 3 and sometime 4 different files to create a single Blender material. They are superb for Cycles renders but the problem comes when you start to create many many materials for your EEVEE scene, each with four 4K textures, and soon you’re out of memory.
I figured much of this out creating my best selling Definitely EEVEE: Definitive Interiors course, a comprehensive set of lessons for new and experienced Blender 2.8 users on how to maximize your EEVEE renders and animations. If you’re interested, you should check it out at https://gum.co/EEVEE
What I’ve decided to do is go the 80/20 route. Let’s get 80% there with 20% the effort. So, what does this mean? Well, it means you can quickly roll your own materials using my custom material shader setup– and you only need a single tileable texture map. This one map can be used to create both the color channel, the roughness channel and the bump map for the material.
There are two secrets that make this trick work:
- Being able to scale the color, roughness and bump textures separately. This helps in creating non-repeating reflective patterns on the material.
- Being able to easily preview ONLY those channels you want to AS THEY’RE RENDERED. This is different from node wrangler’s ctrl - click in that you get to see the actual surface and how it behaves for only the property you’re working with.
I call this new material ONE SHADER TO RULE. The idea being you can use this single, EEVEE memory efficient material to create 80% of the materials you’ll need in your scene.
In fact, not only am I sharing the material shader with you, I’m also throwing in some very nice materials already setup, plus a short course on how to use the new material shader. And it’s all for free.
As usual, I’m giving it away at Gumroad. I do this for a number of reasons, the most important is that I can update the files as needed.