WEBVTT

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For the first time ever, together with version 5.2,

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Blender now ships with a small library of material assets.

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These are part of the new online assets, which come out

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of the box without bloating your initial download size.

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Once you enable online access, they are available

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directly from the asset browser inside of Blender.

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These initial materials are a small selection

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for now, and more will follow in the future.

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They are also all procedural and outfitted with a bunch of parameters, so they have

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lots of possibilities for customization to make them look exactly like you need.

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To get started using the new materials, just open a new asset browser.

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If you have a bunch of assets yourself, you might need

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to select the Essentials library to narrow them down.

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Then you can see that there are a whole bunch of essential

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assets that are included with Blender out of the box.

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Some of them are bundled with the software download, and others are available online.

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To be able to see those, you need to first have online access enabled.

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You can simply do that right here, if you haven't yet.

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And then in the Materials catalog, there are a bunch of material assets

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marked with an icon that shows that they are online.

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The library contains just a few commonly needed materials

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so far, like different types of bricks, tiles, and fabric.

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The focus here was on providing a few useful basics, but the library will grow still.

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Besides the materials, there are also a whole bunch of other new online assets,

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like grease pencil brushes, compositing filters, and base meshes.

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Using those works just the same, but here I

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want to focus on the materials as an example.

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To make use of these new materials, they will first need to be downloaded.

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You can easily do that by clicking on the download icon that pops up over an asset.

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To download multiple assets, you can also just select the

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ones you want and right -click to download all of them.

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And then you're good to go.

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Simply drag one onto a mesh surface in your 3D viewport that will import the

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material data block into your file and assign

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it to the material slot under your cursor.

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This is just the same as it already was for material

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assets that you could have in your user library.

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Now onto the materials themselves.

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How the textures are mapped will depend on what

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the material is meant for and what it looks like.

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But generally, if there is a regular pattern in the

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material, it will by default use the mesh's UV map.

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The scale is generally that the unit square of the

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UVs is equivalent to one meter squared in the texture.

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So you might need to adjust the UVs of the mesh to work with that.

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For these initial materials, you don't need to worry about going outside of the

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unit square with your UVs, since they are not tiling and repeating textures.

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They can be extended however far you want and there won't be any repeating patterns,

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since they are procedural in nature.

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So, but what if now we want to make any changes to the material?

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Assets from the Essentials library are at

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first imported into your file as packed data.

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That means Blender remembers which library they

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came from originally and it can't be edited.

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Like when you link data between files.

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But it's also stored or packed in your file itself.

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So you don't actually depend on that library being

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around when you share the file with someone else.

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So that means an Essentials material cannot directly be edited.

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First, you need to make it local.

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This is easily achieved by clicking on the button

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on the material that indicates that it is packed.

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When I do that, you can see how all these parameters that the material comes with

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stop being grayed out and I can make adjustments.

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But now that packed link is broken and the material

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doesn't associate with the library anymore.

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The material is truly local.

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I recommend you to go through the materials and play around with the parameters.

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For some of them they are quite basic.

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Most materials, for example, have a way to change the

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overall scale of the texture or the overall base color.

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For others, you can change the look of the material

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quite significantly and fine tune them to your needs.

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These wooden boards, for example, have a quite extensive set of parameters

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to not only change the color and roughness,

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but even the pattern of the boards themselves.

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This level of customizability is something that you can't get from tileable textures

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that are based on static photos and is where

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the procedural nature really comes in handy.

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Another feature built into some of these materials worth mentioning is displacement.

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The cobblestone material, for example, looks quite flat out of the box.

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But with displacement enabled, this can look a good bit more realistic and complex.

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Enabling displacement in the material alone is not enough to achieve this though.

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You also need to make sure that your mesh has

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enough vertices for the displacement to look good.

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An easy way to do this is to use a subdivision surface

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modifier and crank the level to a sufficient number.

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If you're using cycles, you can also make use of the adaptive subdivision feature,

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which will ensure a certain density of vertices

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depending on how large the mesh is on screen.

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Careful though, all this subdivision can make displacement quite expensive.