WEBVTT

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Let's talk about procedural textures.

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You've probably heard the term procedural before,

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as well as the term generated in the context of CG.

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These terms are practically synonymous.

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You can often use them interchangeably.

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However, the full term is actually procedurally generated textures.

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Procedurally generated is basically where you create

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a texture using a mathematical formula instead of pixels.

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Practically, these generated textures can scale infinitely without loss of resolution,

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and often have a ton of settings you can tweak to get the look you want.

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It's also much more efficient when it comes to data and file size.

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There are several kinds of procedural textures to choose from.

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Let's go ahead and take a look at them by going to our Shader Editor's Add menu

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and looking through the Textures category.

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Excluding the Image, Environment, and IES textures,

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every other texture you see here is a procedurally generated texture.

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Each of these procedurally generated textures produces a particular pattern,

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such as wave, gradient, or noise.

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Feel free to try any of these out, but for this introduction,

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I'm going to use Voronoi.

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This is a fracture-like texture that we can go ahead

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and connect to our base color input of our shader.

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As you can see, this texture looks a bit like that

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underwater reflective pattern you get, caustics.

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There's a few settings for us to play around with in the node we just made,

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so let's do that.

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We can change intensity to cells,

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and that gives us a cool stained glass version of the texture.

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We can also switch around exactly what kind of distance formula it uses,

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but feel free to experiment with that.

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Most importantly, you can change the scale of the texture infinitely,

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practically speaking.

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As you can see, no matter how much I zoom in on the texture by scaling it down,

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there are still no pixels or resolution problems.

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Now let's say you don't want the color of the texture,

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but you like the shapes.

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Luckily, the factor output is a black and white version of the color output.

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Let's plug that in instead to double check.

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As you can see, it is a nice grayscale version of our texture.

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So is there a situation why we would prefer grayscale over color?

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Well, grayscale, or factor, is typically great for a number of different kinds of maps,

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including roughness maps and transparency maps.

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Let's go ahead and try to plug this into the roughness value.

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As you can see, the cube becomes shiny during some parts and rough during other parts.

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This allows the texture to drive exactly how the roughness is distributed across the mesh.

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It's important to note that sometimes the factor is not just a grayscale version of the color output.

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Instead, it could be, for example, the alpha map,

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or in the case of the brick texture, it outlines the mortar of the brick.

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Procedural textures can be very powerful, especially when mixed together.

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So feel free to play around with how each one looks to better understand their algorithms.