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So far, we have seen how to shape our ideas through modeling; now we will see how to give it matter.

Materials and textures

Textures and materials are used to paint the surface of a 3D model.

Textures and materials are not the same thing, although they are sometimes used interchangeably to refer to the “skin” of the model.

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A material controls how a 3D object appears on the screen.

Materials control the color of the object and how reflective or dull the surface appears.

Materials take multiple textures too.

Textures are simply images used to skin 3D objects (JPEG or PNG).

For instance, a photo of a brick wall could be used to give a 3D model a realistic red brick appearance.

Materials and textures

The main thing to remember is that you cannot apply a texture to an object without a material. On its own, a texture is just an image and can’t do anything; it needs a material to actually apply onto a 3D asset.

Approfondimento: https://conceptartempire.com/3d-textures-vs-materials/

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Materials

The materials defines the optical property of the object, such as the shine and colour.

Most of the objects have variations in pattern and colour, such as the appearance of grains, pile carpets, and more.

The 3D artists are responsible for influencing materials through textures.

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Textures

Textures can be created procedurally (AKA computationally) or made by an artist in a program like GIMP or Photoshop.

An artist could take photographs of rocks and use those to paint the surface of a 3D object, or they could paint a surface texture by hand to get a more stylistic look.

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Shaders

Shaders are scripts that contain mathematical calculations and algorithms that allow determining the rendering of each object according to the lighting and the properties assigned to the equipment.

Metallic

Define whether the material is metallic or dielectric and the resulting reflective properties

Smoothness

Allows to control the “microsurface detail” or smoothness across a surface.

Albedo

Sets a base color for the surface. Albedo allows you to choose the color of the material

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Shaders

Shaders are scripts that contain mathematical calculations and algorithms that allow determining the rendering of each object according to the lighting and the properties assigned to the equipment.

Albedo

Metalness

Smoothness

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Unwrapping

Texture mapping

The process takes place in two steps

Mapping is that process by which we go about defining which points in the image used as textures correspond to which vertices in the 3D model.

You go about breaking down the 3d object into different parts so that it is arranged in a two-dimensional plane

UV Mapping

You go to associate each of these parts with the image sections as you want

The term “UV" determines the two-dimensional plane where this process is carried out, conventionally defined by the coordinate axes u (abscissae) and v (ordinates).

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Animations

Animation is the process of giving motion to what has been modeled.

Simply put, animation is about making something move or change shape over time.

To make something move you need two factors:

A spatial transformation A time frame in which to make that transformation occur

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Involves creating a "deformed" version of the mesh that is recorded as a series of vertex positions to be traveled over an interval of time. In each keyframe of an animation, the vertices are then interpolated between these recorded positions.

This technique is often used for facial expressions.

Animations

Skeletal animation

An object is represented in two parts: a surface representation used to draw the character (called a skin or mesh) and a hierarchical set of interconnected bones (called a skeleton or rig) employed to animate the mesh.

This technique is often used to animate humans.

Rigging involves going to create a weighted association between the bones of the skeleton and the vertices of the mesh.

The process of recording human body motion. A device is used to capture motion through a photogrammetric system consisting of multiple cameras and reflective material markers.

Morph target animation

Motion capture

Approfondimento: VIDEO

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