All language subtitles for 36-MossShader

The moss texture is looking pretty good,
but the shader is looking a bit matte.

There is none of that velvety
shine you'd normally see on moss.

In fact, velvet is the key word here. Velvet
has a specific look, which is caused by small

standing fibers. Moss has a very similar
structure, with lots of standing bits.

This could be simulated by actually
covering the surface with little strands,

but since we want to do everything in the
shader, and this is not intended for such

extreme closeups where the individual
strands would actually be visible,

let's instead just simulate the macroscopic effect
the strands would have on the surface shading.

It just so happens that Blender has
an aptly named Velvet shader that is

made exactly for this purpose. It simulates
how a surface that is covered in tiny hairs

would look from far away. So let's replace
the Diffuse shader with a Velvet shader.

The first thing we notice, is how much
darker it gets, especially at the parts

where we are looking at the moss straight
on. This is to be expected, as you'd see

basically no light reflected when looking
straight into a surface made of tiny hairs.

Let's increase the color
brightness a bit to compensate.

We can see that already the moss looks quite
shiny. It's particularly noticeable how the

Velvet shader highlights the edges, where the
surface of the moss curves away from the view.

To make the shine even more prominent, we
can lower the sigma a bit. This makes the

moss a bit darker again, but increases the
contrast of the nice highlights at the edges.

This is a nice effect, but our moss
is probably a bit too shiny now.

That's because this shader is simulating a
surface that is completely composed of tiny hairs,

as if there is nothing underneath. But in
reality, everything is much more messy,

with a lot of surfaces in different directions, so
the moss would also display some diffuse behavior.

The answer is to bring back our
Diffuse shader, and mix the two,

so that we have a certain amount of diffuse
and a certain amount of velvet behavior.

So adding a Diffuse shader, and a Mix shader,
we can connect them, and set the mixing factor.

.5 is a bit too diffuse. We really want quite a
bit of that velvety look. .8 seems to work well.

Now if we switch to Eevee, our moss looks
extremely bright. That's because unfortunately,

Eevee doesn't support the
Velvet shader at the moment,

so it's falling back on the diffuse behavior.

So we can't get the proper velvet effect
in Eevee, but we can work around the

brightness issue so that our shader
at least looks presentable in Eevee.

Let's make a version of the
shader that looks good in Eevee.

We'll need only the diffuse component, so
let's duplicate the Diffuse shader. Then,

we still want to use the same color, but quite a
bit darker. So let's add a Hue Saturation node.

Then we can plug this into the Mix node
where we combine the wall and the moss.

Now it's just a matter of lowering the Value
until the color looks reasonable. That seems

alright. Now we have two versions of the moss
shader, one for Cycles, and one for Eevee.

Unfortunately, there is currently no way
to tell Blender to conditionally connect

one or the other shader into our Mix,
depending on the render engine, however,

if we take a look at the Material Output, we
see that we can select a render engine there.

So if we have two versions of the whole
shader, we can just plug each of them into

a separate Material Output for the respective
render engine. So let's duplicate the Material

Output. We'll set the first one to Cycles,
and reconnect the fancy Velvet shader.

Then let's set the second output to Eevee,

and duplicate the Shader Mix node, so that we
can create two versions of the whole shader.

Then it's just a matter of plugging the simplified
moss shader in there, and connecting it to the

Material Output, as well as the Displacement
node, which we need for the normals in Eevee.

Now, if we look at the Eevee output, we don't
get that super bright version of the shader,

but if we switch to Cycles, our
nice velvet effect is still there.

And finally, it's time to
organize the nodes again.