HOW DO I CREATE A STYLISED STONE MATERIAL IN BLENDER?
Anne Grills, Ireland
Pietro Chiovaro replies
There are many ways to create a stylised stone material, the most common of which is the use of textures and in this article, I will show you how to create a stylised stone material using just two and a half textures and some default nodes.
For this material I started off with a really simple model, basically a distorted sphere, and to begin, I created and assigned a new material. First of all, we have to open the Node Editor panel and add: the Texture Coordinate input, two Image Textures, the default Voronoi Texture, two Subsurface Scattering BSDF shaders, two Mapping nodes, the Hue Saturation Value, the Mix Shader, and of course the Material Output.
The first thing we have to connect is the Texture Coordinate. It doesn’t need a UV map, so we can connect it with the Generated input. Starting from this point we have to select the two essential textures: a sort of mossy/grass texture and a yellowish texture that will simulate the rock of the material. As we are aiming to create a stylised material here, the textures do not need to be largely detailed. Consequentially, both image textures can be linked to the Hue Saturation Value and the Subsurface Scattering BSDF shaders.
Now we have to combine these two nodes and create the mossy effect at the top of the stone. To do this we can use the Mix Shader and connect the two Subsurface Scattering shaders while linking the Voronoi Texture to the Fac input, which will help us to define the moss starting point (percentage of moss at the top of the stone). Last but not least we have to connect the Mix Shader to the Material Output.
All the values for this material depend on the texture we use. Generally for the Hue Saturation Value we can set parameters similar to the defaults, while for the Mapping node we need to consider the level of detail we wish to include in the final material. In this case, I kept a low value (low texture resolution) to create this sort of ‘blur’ effect. Finally, in the Voronoi Texture, I suggest you activate the Smooth F1 method, increase the Smoothness to 1.000 and reduce the scale to 1.700.