Procedural Moss Material (Blender Tutorial) transcript

in this tutorial I will show you how to create this procedural Moss material in blender this procedural material is available for purchase on my gumroad store as well as my patreon page and the blender market so for those of you who purchased the material I'm going to show you how to use the material right now so there are two Moss nodes there is a moss node and there is a moss only node and there are also two material outputs so if you just select the material output that is going to enable it and so you can see now it's just going to use the Moss only node and so now there is moss all over the object or you can use this Moss node just by selecting this material output and it's going to use the Moss where there's some moss growing on another material and the differences between the Moss and the Moss only is that the Moss has the material underneath and the Moss placement whereas the Moss only is completely Moss so there isn't any material underneath or Moss placement so the material underneath is where you're going to put the material that you want the Moss to be growing on so just for an example I added this diffuse Shader which just to show you I could turn up the colors maybe make it something different so whatever material you want the Moss to be growing on you can just put that into the material underneath Shader on the Moss Shader and then the next one that we have here is the Moss placement and so this is going to be how the Moss is placed on the object and so we have two different nodes for this we have the Moss Factor noise and we have the Moss Factor gradient so the first one that you're seeing here is the Moss Factor noise and so this is just going to be some random noise so there's just Moss placed randomly around and you have the Moss amount so if you want there to be much less Moss you could turn this way down or you could turn it up if you want more Moss then there is a noise scale that just change the scale of the noise and then there's also some noise detail so I can make the Moss more detailed or less detailed and then we have the noise location and noise rotation so I can drag around the X Y and Z values and that's just going to move them all surround and the same thing for the rotation I can rotate the Moss around so that is the noise factor of the Moss place the other one that we have is the Moss Factor gradient so what I can do is just take this wire here and I can plug it up instead to the Moss placement and so now we're using this gradient as the factor instead of the noise so again we have the Moss amount so you can make very little Moss just turn that down or you can have lots of moss then we also have the dot scale and this is going to change kind of the scale of those dots along the gradient so if you want to change the dot scale you can do that so I could turn this way down and now you can see they're kind of more in clumps or I could turn this way up and it's much more detailed then we also have the dots detail so I could turn this way down to zero and you can see the Moss is kind of growing in little patches and little dots or I could turn the dots detail up if I want it to be very detailed then we also have the gradient scale so if I want the gradient to be really thin I can just turn that down or I could turn the gradient way up and then we also have the detail and the detail too and then again just like the other Factor we have the location so if I want to move the gradient around I can so if you want to change where the Moss is growing you can do that and then we also have gradient rotation so for instance maybe I want the Moss to be on the bottom of the object and growing up I can rotate it over or vice versa I could move this over just kind of rotate that and now the Moss is on the top of the objects and they're growing down so that is the Moss gradient factor and the noise Factor so you can just plug those into the Moss placements depending on how you want the Moss to be placed so then we have a color one in color two and this is just going to change the colors of the Moss so you could maybe make this a bit brighter or a bit darker you could also make it slightly more yellow and it'll maybe look like a dried old Moss or you could make it a bit more green and a bit more saturated to make it look like some fresh Moss then we also have the subsurface here so the subsurface scattering is just going to allow more light to go through the Moss and then we also have the subsurface color so you can just change this depending on what color you want but you're probably going to leave it to Green most of the time then we also have the texture scale and so this is the texture of the Moss so if I zoom up closely to the Moss I can just change the texture scale and then finally here at the very bottom we have the bump strength one we have the bump strength two and then we also have the displacement strength so the Moss is using displacement so wherever the Moss is that is actually going to pop out of the mesh and then over here on the Moss only it has the same things so it has the texture scale the bump strengths and the displacement strengths as well as the subsurface and all of the colors now here in the viewport you might have noticed that the Moss does look a little bit low quality and that's actually just because I turn the subsurf levels down so the viewport is a bit faster but I have subdivision surface modifiers on these objects give them more detail so if I simply turn up the levels viewport you can now see the Moss is way more detailed it is a little bit more laggy in the viewport so here on the viewport levels I just turn this down so that it was faster in the viewport but then here on the render I can turn this up really high so that it is much more detailed so that is how you use the procedural Moss Shader and if you'd like to purchase the Shader I will have links in the description to where you can purchase on my gumroad store and my patreon page and the blender market and purchasing the material is a great way to help support this channel but in this tutorial I will also show you how to set this entire thing up if you want to create it yourself and if you'd like to purchase more of my procedural materials you can also check out my blender procedural material packs and you can also check out my ultimate procedural material pack and my ultimate material pack has all of my procedural materials pre-set up in blender's asset browser with custom thumbnails sorted catalogs and customizable node groups and if you'd like to learn how to create any of my procedural materials then you can also check out my blender procedural material tutorial playlist here on YouTube so real quick I'm going to show you what I have set up in the 3D viewport if you want to set it up the same way that I have so I press shift a and I went here to mesh and I added a monkey head but you could really add this procedural Moss to any object and then I also press shift a I went here to mesh and I added an icosphere and then right behind me if you open up the add icosphere settings right after you add the icosphere I'm going to turn the subdivisions up to a 6 so that it is very high quality because we want a very detailed subdivided mesh because we're going to be using the displacements in the node Editor to make the Moss actually popping out so I'm not going to bring this object over here and then I want to scale these objects down because using the real life scale and blender the default primitive shapes are a little bit higher than the average human so I'm just going to select both of these objects and I'm going to scale them by 0.3 so just 0.3 and then enter and then I can just bring these here into the center and then I also need to press Ctrl a and I just need to apply the scale so that this is now the object's new default size now I want to give these objects the subdivision surface modifier so that they have even more geometry for the displacements to work so I'm going to click right over here on the modifier properties I'm going to click on ADD modifier and let's add the subdivision surface now it will get a little bit laggy in the viewport so I'm going to turn the red gender levels higher but then I'm going to keep the viewport levels lower this way it'll render with this number but it'll only display in the viewport the top number so I'm going to turn the render to 3 and the viewport to 1 here on the psychosphere and then I can shade the object smooth and then also here on the monkey head the shortcut key to add the subdivision surface modifier is Ctrl 2 so I'm just going to add the subsurf modifier and then here on the viewport I'm just going to keep these at 2 so the viewport is a bit faster but then on the render levels I'm going to turn this all the way up to 6 so that it'll be much higher quality and then again I can shade the object smooth and then I just kind of rotate these objects over and I also added a camera and I just pointed the camera at the objects and then for the lighting I added these two area lights so this first area light over here has a slightly yellow color and a power of 700 and then this other light here and this one I turned a rectangle and I made it going up and down and it kind of acts like a rim light on the side of the objects and again this one one has a very slight yellow color and a power of a thousand and then if you go over here to the World Properties I also added in this machine shop zero two one khdri so this is a free hdri from polyhaven.com links in the description if you'd like to download it and I just downloaded the 1K HDR version and then after I downloaded the hdri I added a new world and right here on the yellow dot you can click on color and then you can choose environment texture and then you can just click on the open button and open up the downloaded hdri and then I turned the strength to 0.8 so it's a little less strong so this will give us some really nice natural lighting now also if you want to make the background transparent you can go right over here to the render properties and you can open up the film Tab and you can check mark the transparent button and that way the background isn't quite as distracting because you can't see it in the background and then also to make the lighting and the colors a bit nicer I'm using the view transform of filmic here on the color space and I also set the look to high contrast and then because we're using displacements I am going to be using the Cycles rendering engine and I also want to use Cycles because I am going for realism so make sure that you are using the Cycles rendering engine so now let's go right over here to the shading workspace so in the shading workspace I'm in the rendered mode in the viewport here and then I have the Shader editor right over here so I'm just going to select one of the objects and let's click on new and I can just rename it to Moss and then I can click and drag and I can drop this material onto the other object now in order to get the displacements to work there is a very important setting that you need to turn on so real quick I'm going to go back here to the layout and I'm going to click down here to go to the material properties and I'm just going to scroll down and then right here under the settings tab under the surface right here on the displacement you want to click on this and you want to change this to displacement and bump and this is telling the material that it can use the displacement so make sure you turn that on on the Moss material so if you we can now go right back over here to the shading layout now I'm also going to be using the node Wrangler add-on in this tutorial to preview the different nodes so if you don't have the node Wrangler enabled you can click here on edit and you can go to the preferences and then over there in the add-ons tab just search for node Wrangler and check mark the node Wrangler add-on and I'll show you how to use it in the video so let's now create the Moss material so I'm going to start by pressing shift a let's go to the search and I can search for the voronoi texture I'm going to place it here and then using the feature the node Wrangler I can control shift and select different nodes and that is going to preview the node on the object and then also with the voronoi texture selected I'm going to press Ctrl T that's using another feature of the node Wrangler add-on it's going to add the texture coordinate and mapping and then I want to use the object coordinates so let's put the object into the vector of the mapping and the object coordinates is going to place the texture on the object more evenly and then we can use the mapping node later to transform the location rotation and scale of the material so then here on the voronoi texture I want to make it bigger so let's just turn the scale up to like a 40. now that doesn't really look like moss because right now it's just a bunch of little dots and so I want to distort the voronoi texture with another texture so I'm going to press shift a and I'm going to go to the search and I'm going to search for a noise texture and let's put the noise texture in between the mapping and the voronoi so this way the noise texture is going through the vector and so it's distorting the placement of the vorno texture and make sure that the color of the noise texture is going to the vector of the voronoi and then let's also change some of the noise texture settings so I'm going to turn the scale up to like a 10 and then I do want it to be very detailed so I'll turn the detail up to the max of 15. and I also want there to be a little bit of roughness so I'm going to turn the roughness to a 0.7 so now we have a really nice high quality Moss texture and if you zoom way in there you can see it's very detailed so I now want to create the colors of the Moss so I'm going to bring the principle Shader over and I can press shift a let's go to the search and I can search for the mix node let's drop this down here and then I want to click on the color and I want to change it to float instead and then I want to put the distance of the voronoi into the factor so the factor is going to determine where it's going to be color a and where it's going to be color B so these white and black values from the voronoi texture is going to tell it where it'll be a and where it'll be B so I'm going to Ctrl shift and select the mix node to preview it so we can now just make a and b the different colors that we want for the Moss so for color a I'm going to make this kind of like a dark green so I'll make it green and then kind of dark and then for color B I want this to be a green color as well but it will be a little bit lighter and if you want to use the same colors that I'm using you can go over to the hex value and here on color a you can punch in 0 2 2a00 and then right here on color B the hex value is 2D 5 2 0 e so we can now take the result from the mix and let's put that into the base color and then I can control shift and select the principal Shader to preview it now I also want to allow a little bit of light to go through the Moss so I want to add some subsurface scattering so right here on the subsurface I'm going to trim this to a very small number of just .01 so there will just be a tiny little bit of subsurface so there's a little bit of light going through the material now right here on the subsurface radius I want to click on this and I want to change all of these values to one so you can click and drag down and let go and then just type in one and then hit enter and these values are the red green and blue values so for instance if I turn up this top one here it's going to use a lot more red or if I turn this one up it's a lot more green or this one is a lot more blue but I just want an even amount of red green and blue on the subsurface scattering so I'm turning them all to one and then here on the subsurface color I'm going to also make this a dark green color and the hex value that I'll be be using for the subsurface color is going to be 0 e 3 5 0 0. now this Moss kind of looks like plastic right now because it is so shiny so here on the principled Shader I just want to turn up the roughness so it is not quite as reflective and I'm going to turn up the roughness value to a 0.72 I think that is pretty good now this Moss is very smooth and I want to make the Moss much more bumpy and rough so we're going to take the noise texture and the vorno texture and we're going to put them into the normal to give the material some bump so I'm first going to take the distance from the voronoi and let's put that into the normal now we need to convert this to normal data you can see there's some weird shading issues and that is because this is black and white data but then this is normal data so to convert it to normal data we can press shift a let's go to the search and we can search for the bump node and let's put the bump node in between the voronoi and the normal and then we actually want the distance to be going into the height value and that way it'll convert it to normal data so now you can see it looks very bumpy and then it is a bit too strong so I'm just going to turn the strength down to like a 0.3 now I also want to put this noise texture into the bump as well so I can select this bump node I'll press shift d to duplicate it let's stick it here and then I can take the noise texture factor and let's put that into the height value of this bump and then I want the normal from this bump to be going into the normal of the other bump and this way we can mix multiple boat Maps together and then on the strength here on this one I want to turn this up to like 0.5 so that the noise bump is a bit stronger so now that is really starting to look like moss alright so this is the basic Moss Shader but I now want to be able to mix this Shader with another Shader so it looks like the Moss is growing on another material so to do this I can press shift a I can go to the search and I'm going to search for the mix Shader and let's put the mix Shader here after the principled Shader so just like the mix node can mix two colors together this mix Shader can mix two shaders together so then you can add whatever you want for the other Shader I'm just going to press shift a I'm going to go to the search and I'm just going to search for a diffuse Shader and I will just stick this up here and then I want to put the principal Shader into the bottom one and then I want to take the diffuse Shader and I'm going to put that into the top one and then here on the diffuse color I'm just going to make this a very dark color so now the factor is going to blend between only using the diffuse Shader at zero or only using the Moss Shader one but instead of evenly fading or evenly blending between them I want to add a factor in here to control where it's going to be the Moss and where it's going to be the diffuse and so to do this we're going to create another node setup up here so I'm going to press shift a I'm going to go to the search and I'm going to start by adding a noise texture let's stick this here and then with the noise texture selected I can press Ctrl T and that will add the texture coordinate and mapping and again I want to use the object coordinates so let's put the object to the vector and then I can control shift and select the noise texture to preview it and then here on the noise texture settings I'm going to turn the scale up up to like a 20 so there is more scale I also want to turn the detail up so I'll turn the detail to the max of 15 so it looks much more detailed and also I do want to add even more roughness so there's even more detail so I will turn the roughness 2.8 now I need to make this much more contrasty because if I control shift and select the mix Shader and then if I take the noise texture factor and put that into the factor here you can see it isn't really doing much because it is very gray so what I'm going to do is press shift a let's go to the search and I'm going to search for a color ramp and we're going to put the color ramp in between the noise texture and the mix Shader Factor so just stick it right here and then I can start to drag these two tabs together and as I drag it together it's going to be more contrasty if I control shift and select the color ramp you can see the darker parts are darker and the lighter parts are lighter so now that it's very contrasty if I control shift and select the mix Shader if you put the color ramp color into the factor that's going to determine where it's using the diffuse and where it's using the principled Shader so now you can see the Moss just appears as though it's growing in some places here and there and if you want there to be more Moss you can drag these both over or if you want there to be less Moss you can drag this way back so this is looking really cool but we still aren't using any displacements because if you look here on the edge of the Moss you can see it is very smooth so what I want to do is I want to take the same value here that is controlling the factor and I want to put that into the displacement and why I want to use the same exact value is because this color ramp is controlling where the Moss is so if I change these nodes here that's going to change where the Moss is and so as well as that changing the mix Shader it also needs to change where the displacement is so what I'm going to do is hold down the shift key and then I'm going to right click and drag over this wire and then let go and this is going to add a reroute so I can drag the reroute down here and then I can pull out a wire here and I'm going to put this into the displacement now if I I zoom out here you can see there's a big problem it's kind of jetting off to the side and that is because we need to convert this color data from the color ramp into displacement data so I'll press shift a let's go to the search and I can search for the displacement node and I want to put the displacement node here in the wire going from this reroute into the displacement so let's put this here and I can just drag this down and then we actually want this wire here to be going into the height value of the display Spin and that way it'll convert it to displacement data and then as I mentioned at the starting of this video if I go back over here to the layout if I go over here to the material properties and scroll down here on the settings under surface you want to make sure this is set to displacement and bump and that way you are telling the material that it can use the displacements so if the displacements aren't working make sure that a set to displacement and boom so I'm going to go back here to the shading workspace now you can see that the Moss is way too strong it's popping out way too much so I can just turn the scale value down and that's going to make it much strong so I'm going to turn the displacement strength to a .005 so it is very subtle but if I zoom in there on the edges you can definitely see the Mosses popping out and you can of course turn it up and make it stronger if you want to pop out more I'm just going to use a scale of .005 and there we go so this is really starting to look cool and it looks a lot like moss now there is one more node that I want to add for later use I'm going to press shift a let's go to the search and I'm going to search for the Hue saturation value and let's put the Hue saturation value here after the color ramp and why I want this Hue saturation value is because the value is going to make it lighter or darker so if I turn this up you can see there's more Moss but if I turn this way down you can see there is much less moss and so we are going to use this value when we join this together into a custom node group and this will control how much Moss it's using because this color ramp here we can't actually control this when we join it together into a node group because there isn't any value here so we're going to use this value instead to make the Moss more or less but for now we'll just leave those settings at the default so these nodes here this is going to be the noise Factor but I also want to create another version of the factor and that is going to be a gradient where the Moss is growing much more on one side and then it kind of grows Less on the other side so let's create that so I'm going to press shift a let's go to the search and I can search for the gradient texture and let's put the gradient up here and then I can control shift and select the gradient texture to preview it and then with the gradient selected I'm going to press Ctrl T to use the texture coordinate and mapping and then I want to use the object coordinates so let's put the object into the vector of the mapping now you can see the gradient is pretty dark over on this side and so I actually want to move it over so right here on the mapping we have this location X and that is going to move it around on the x-axis so I want to turn this value to a 0.52 I think 0.52 is pretty good and this way you can see that the gradient is very subtle over here here but then it is much stronger over here it is much wider and it does seem very subtle but later on when we add more nodes it'll be much more contrasty and it'll look a lot better but you can also just change this around if you want to at any point now I do of course want to make this gradient more contrasty because right now it is very gray so I'll press shift a let's go to the search and I'm going to search for the color ramp and let's put the color ramp here after the gradient texture and then I actually want to flip these values so I can just click on the white Tab and drag it over and then click on the black Tab and drag this over here because I do want to switch those values and then I just want to drag the black tab over here and I'm going to bring it over to something like that so now you can see that it is much more contrasty it's very dark here but then it is very white over here now to actually preview this affecting the Moss I can take the color from the color ramp and I can just stick this here in this reroute so we're going to replace it for the Hue saturation value and I can drag the reroute up here so it's a bit higher and then I can control shift and select the mix Shader so because we put this color ramp into the reroute that is going into the factor of the mix Shader and it's also going to the height value of the displacement and so now you can see over on this side there isn't any Moss but then over on this side there is much more Moss but this actually looks very boring it's very smooth and it doesn't have any noise so I actually want to distort the gradient texture so that it is much more random and I also want to give it that little texture with those little dots so what I'm going to do is drag the texture coordinate back and also drag the mapping back here so we have a bit more space and I'm also going to control shift and select the color ramp so that we can just preview the color so I'm now going to press shift a and I'm going to go to the search and I want to add the voronoi texture and I want to put the vorno texture here in between the mapping and the gradient and then I actually want to take the distance value and I want to put the distance into the vector of the gradient texture because the distance value is those little dots and then I also want to turn the scale up so right here on the scale I want to turn this up to like 50 so there are much more dots so now the voronoi texture is going through the vector and so it is distorting the placement of the gradient the problem with this is that it's distorting it so much that we can't even see the gradient it just looks like all these dots so I want to make the voronoi texture less strong so it's going to affect the gradient texture less so I'm going to press shift a let's go to the search and I can search for the mix node and let's just drop this up here and then I want to click on the float here and I want to change this to color instead and then I can drop this mixed node in between the voronoi and the gradient so the mix node is going to mix color a and color B so I want to take the voronoi distance and I want to make sure that is going into color a and then I want to take this original mapping node here and I want to put that into color B so if I turn the factor all the way to 1 it's just using B and so it's just using a mapping if I turn the factor all the way to zero it's just using a and so it's just using the voronoi and then there is also another setting that I want to change on this mix here I want to click on the mix here and I want to instead change this to the linear light and I can now drag this around and so I can turn the factor all the way up to one and if I turn the factor all the way up to one it's fully using the gradient but then the voronoi texture is distorting the gradient so you can see it is now black over here and white over here with with a bunch of little dots and so that is looking very cool so I can now control shift and select the mix Shader to preview that how that's looking but there is a problem the dots are very smooth and round and that isn't very realistic so I also right back up here I want to add a noise texture to distort the placement of the voronoi and then the voronoi texture is going to distort the placement of the gradient so what I'm going to do is press shift a let's go to the search and I'm going to search for the noise texture and let's put this up here so to make this noise texture distort the voronoi I want to put the noise texture right here in between the mapping and the vorno texture so now you can see it's distorting it and let's also change some of the noise texture settings so right here on the roughness I'm going to turn this up to like a 0.76 so there's more roughness and I'll also turn the detail up to the max of 15. and then I will just leave the scale at five now it's distorting it way too much you can see it's just super noisy and you can't even see the voronoid texture so what I want to do is again use the same mix node with the linear light and I want to put this into the noise texture and then I want to make it so that it's controlling the vornoy less so I can just click on this linear light here this mix and I can press shift d to duplicate it and I want to stick it here in between the noise texture and the voronoi so we can now take the original mapping node and this isn't distorted at all and I can take the vector and I can put that into B and then actually I didn't plug this up correctly so what I actually want to do is I want to take the noise texture factor and I want to put that into B here and then I want to unplug the color from a and I instead want to take the mapping vector and let's put that into a so if I now turn the factor all the way to 0 the noise texture isn't having any control over the Distortion and so it just looks like the voronoi texture but then as I turn the factor up it's going to distort it more and more and if I turn the factor all the way to 1 it's fully using the noise texture to distort the Moss so I just want to turn this to a very small number of 0.1 so so that way is distorting it but it is much more subtle and so now you can see we have that really cool texture there on the gradient because the noise texture is distorting the voronoi and then the voronoi texture is distorting the gradient and you can also drag this around so if you want to be more distorted you could turn that up or if you want to be very subtle and just have a little bit of noise you could turn that to a very small number I'm just going to leave that at 0.1 and then again just like we had this Hue saturation value I want to add the Hue saturation value here for when we join this together into a custom node group so I'm going to click on this Hue saturation value and I'm going to press shift d to duplicate it and let's stick it right here after this color ramp so we can use that later when we join this together into a custom node group and that is what we're going to be doing next so we're now going to be joining these together into custom node groups so this is going to be a custom node group that'll be the Moss then we also have this group here and that is going to be the noise factor and then we also have this here and that is going to be the gradient Factor so first what I'm going to do is hit the B for the Box select and I'm going to box select all these nodes here so this principles Shader and all the nodes behind it and this is all the Moss and I'm going to drag this over and then I'm going to hit the b key again to box select these and I'm going to box select the reroute and the mix Shader and the displacement so just box select all those nodes we don't want to select the diffuse because that is going to be a different Shader so with all these nodes selected I now want to press Ctrl G and Control G is going to join it together into a custom node group and I can also bring this down here so you can press the tab key and the tab key is going to go in and out of the node group so if I press tab to go out of the node group I want to drag this out to make it bigger then I just want to rename it so I'm going to rename it to Moss and then if I press the Tab Key to go back into the node group I can press the N key to open up the side panel and if you click over here on group you can see there are inputs and their outputs and so we can use this to change how the Shader looks so I just want to click on the Shader here and I want to actually click on the Arrow just to bring it up so that it is on top so if I press the Tab Key to go out of the node group you can see the shaders on top and let's also drag this over and I want to stick it right here next to the material output so I can now press the Tab Key again to go back into the node group so then right here we have the Shader and we also have the factor and this Shader this is going to be the material which is underneath because if I press tab to go out of the node group you can see this diffuse is going into the Shader so if I select the Moss and tab to go into the node group I can double click here on the inputs on this Shader to rename it and I want to rename this to material underneath now right here on this Factor this is going to control where the Moss is because if I tab to go out of the node group you can see this group right here this is the gradient and that gradient is going into the factor so this is controlling where the Moss is so if I select the Moss I can tab again to go into the node group and I want to double click on this to rename it and I want to rename this to Moss placement so if I press the Tab Key you can see we have material underneath and Moss placement so let's now make all of the different custom values for the Moss so I will again press the Tab Key to go into the node group so the next values that I want to add are the colors so right here on this group input we can add values into the extra slot here and then we'll be able to control those values so let's first take color a and put that in here and then also color B and I can put that in there and then I want to double click on these to rename them and I'm going to rename this to Moss color one and then also here on B I'm going to rename this to Moss color two now I also want to be able to control the subsurface so let's take the subsurface value right here and let's put that right in there and you can see it already says subsurface and let's also take the subsurface color let's pull out a wire and I can stick this in here to the extra slot and you can see it already says subsurface color now I also want to be able to control the entire scale of the Moss material and so that is where this mapping node comes in because this mapping node is connected up to all the textures so we can change the scale and that's going to change the scale of the entire material so let's take the scale here and I want to put that into this one down here but then I want this to be one single value so if I click here on the scale right now this is set to Vector so if I go out of the node group you can see there are three different values but I just want to use one value so back in the node group if you click on scale I want to click on the type here and I'm going to change it to flow instead and this way it'll just use one value so if I tab to go out of the node group I can just turn the scale back to the default of one and now that looks correct and then if I tab to go back into the node group I want to click on this to rename it and I want to rename this to texture scale and then finally I want to add the bump strengths and the displacement strengths so let's take the bump strength here from the first one put that in there also the second one will take the strength and we'll put that into the extra slot and then finally right over here we can take the displacement scale and let's pull out a wire bring this all the way over here and I want to stick it into the extra socket here and then I can click on these to rename these so the first one I just want to rename to bump strength one and then if I select this entire thing I will press Ctrl C to copy I can double click on this one and I can press Ctrl V to paste and I just want to rename this to bump strength 2. and then right here on the last one I want this one to be displacement strength alright so those are all the custom values so I can now hit the Tab Key to go back out of the node group so we now have the colors we have the subsurface and the subsurface color we also have the texture scale and then we have the bump strengths and we also have the displacement string all right so now that we've finished this node I also want to duplicate this and make another version of this node which is completely Moss so I'm just going to click on this small Shader and I'll press Shifty to duplicate and let's just drop it right down here now these Moss shaders are the same exact Shader so if we change one it's going to affect the other so what I want to do is separate this so that it is its own node so I'm going to click on this two button right here and that's going to duplicate the node so now it is separate so that I can click on this to rename it and I'm going to rename it to a moss only because this is going to be only the Moss and then I also want to click on the material output here and I want to press shift d to duplicate and I can drop it down here and then I want to put the Shader up to the surface and also the displacement I want to put that up to the displacement so now if I select the material output it'll turn red and so it's just going to use the Moss only or if I click on this one it's going to use the Moss with the different factors so I'm going to click on this one just to preview it now the pro problem with this one is that it has the material underneath and the Moss placement and also it doesn't really have any displacement so I'm going to get rid of these two values here and then I also want to add some sort of displacement so that it looks bumpy so if I just press the Tab Key to go into the Moss only I want to click here on the material underneath and I just want to hit the minus here to get rid of it and also the Moss placement I'll hit the minus to get rid of it now because this is the Moss only we don't want to use any mix Shader because we only want to use one single printable Shader because the entire material is moss so we can click on the mix Shader and we can press X to delete it we can also click on this reroute here and press X to delete and then we want the principled Shader to be going into the Shader of the group output so now the entire material is made of moss now we still don't have any displacement value because the displacement value for this Moss is being controlled by the gradient and the noise but if I go back to the Moss and tab to go into the node group we don't actually have anything to add into the displacement so instead I'm just going to use this noise texture right here so let's just take the noise texture Factor I'm going to pull out a wire and I'm going to stick this into the height value of the displacement so this way the noise is going to control the displacement now you can see it is very subtle you can hardly see it taking effect and that is because the scale is so small so I will just tab to go back out of the node group and then right here on this displacement strength I'm going to turn it up and I think that a value of .04 looks pretty good so I'm just going to turn the Moss only displacement strength to a .04 so now you can see the entire material is moss so now you can click back and forth between these if you want to use the Moss or the Moss only I'm going to click on this one here to use the Moss so we now need to create the other custom nodes before we do that though I do want to label this diffuse Shader just so that we know that it's the material underneath so I'm going to drag this over here and drag it really close to the Moss I can also drag it out to make it a bit bigger and then with the diffuse Shader selected I'm going to press Ctrl J Ctrl J is just going to add a frame and then if I click on the frame I can press f2 to add a label and on the label here I just want to call this material underneath just to keep things very organized so that you don't get confused so material underneath so then whatever Shader you want to be underneath the Moss you can plug that up to the material underneath so you could add some sort of metal Shader or some sort of brick or dirt or really whatever you want but for now I'm just going to use the diffuse alright so then if you go right up here I want to join all these nodes together into a custom node group so I'm just going to box select these and I'm going to drag them down here and then with just these nodes selected you can press Ctrl G and Ctrl G will join them together into a node group and I can press the Tab Key to go out of the node group and you can see it's very small let's click on this to rename it and I want to rename this to Moss Factor noise and it's a little bit hard to see so I'm going to make it bigger so Moss Factor noise now you can see there isn't any values here and that's because if I tab to go into the node group I want to take the Hue saturation value and I want to put that into this group output here that way if I tab back out of the node group we now have this color so I can just drag this right down here underneath the material underneath so then just to preview this I'm going to replace it for the Moss placement so I'm going to take the Moss Factor noise and I'm going to put the color into the Moss placement and we're replacing it for this Hue saturation value so then we want to create all the custom values for the Moss Factor noise so let's tab to go into the node group so the first value that I want to add is the amount of moss so let's take the value here from the Hue saturation value and let's put that into the group input and I can double click click on this to rename it and I can just rename it to Moss amount and then I also want to change the entire scale of the noise so let's take the scale value here and I can put that into the bottom socket here and then if I click on this I want to again make it one single value so let's click on the type here and I want to instead change it to float and then if I double click on this to rename it I just want to rename it to noise scale and then if I press the Tab Key to go out of the node group we want to change this noise scale back to the default value of one and then I can tab to go into the node group now I also want two noise details so we can take the noise texture detail let's put that in here and we can also take the noise texture roughness and let's put that in there and then right up here I can double click on this to rename it so I want to rename this one to noise detail one and then this roughness down here I want to rename this one to noise detail two and then I also want to have the location and rotation because I want to be able to move it around so we can take the location here from the mapping let's put that here and then we can also take the rotation from the mapping and we can put that in here and then again we can double click on these to rename them so I'm just going to rename this to like noise location and then I also want to rename this one to noise rotation all right so I can press the Tab Key to go out of the node group and we now have all these different values so we have the Moss amount and we also have the noise scale and we also have the different noise details and then we also have the location and the rotation just to rotate that around so that is the Moss Factor noise so I want to do pretty much the same exact thing for these last nodes here so I can click and drag to box select all these nodes I can bring them down here and then I can press Ctrl G to join them together into a node group and I want to take the Hue saturation value and I want to put the color into this group output so I can now tab to go out of the node group I can drag this over and I want to put it underneath the bottom one we can actually make it a little bit bigger and then I want to click on this to rename it and I want to rename this one to Moss Factor gradient and and then to preview this taking effect I can replace it for the Moss Factor so what I'm actually going to do is just hold down the shift key and right click and drag over this wire and let go and then I can drag this down here and then I can just drag this up here and what I actually want to do is drag this right here and then I want to let go and this way we can add a node here but then what I'm going to do is just search for the reroute so I'm going to start to type in reroute and I can just add the reroute and then just drop it there so now we just have these two reroutes so then we can just very easily plug each one up so I want to preview the gradient so I'm going to stick this one here and also while we're doing this I am just going to box select all these nodes so I'm going to box select the noise factor and also the gradient factor and also the reroutes so with all of these nodes selected I can press Ctrl J to join them together into a frame I can maybe bring these back to compact them a little bit and then drag this up and then with the frame selected I can press f2 to add a label and I want to rename this to to Moss placement so then to finish this off we just need to add the custom values for the Moss Factor gradient so let's select this node and we can press the tab e to go into the node group so just like we did before I want to add the amount of moss so we can take the value from the Hue saturation value I can drag this over and I want to put this into the group input and then if I click on this to rename it I just want to rename it Moss amount now I also want to be able to control the scale of the dots so if I go here to this voronoi texture this scale value here is going to control the scale of the dots so let's take the scale I can drag this over and put this right in here and then I can just click on this to rename it and I want to rename it two dots scale and then I also want to be able to control the detail of the dots and so that's going to be controlled by this Factor here so if I turn this Factor up here on the linear light and this one is after the noise texture if I turn up the factor it's going to distort it more and more so let's take the factor and I can put this right in here and then right here if I double click on this to rename this I want to rename this one two dots detail now I also want to control the entire scale of the gradient so to do that we can take the mapping scale and we can put that into this one here and then if I double click on this to rename it I can just rename it to gradient scale and then again I want this to be one single value not three values so if I click on the gradient scale I can change the type instead to float and then if I tab to go out of the group the gradient scale I just want to turn this to 1 which is the default and then I can tab to go back into the group now I also want to have the noise details so I can take the detail here from this noise put that in here and also the roughness put this in here and then I can just rename these so I'm going to rename this to noise detail one and then this one right here this is going to be noise detail two and then finally I just want the location and the rotation to move the gradient around so let's put the location right in here and also the rotation I can put that in there and then I can double click on this to rename this and I can just rename this to gradient location and then also here I can just rename this to gradient rotation and if I press the Tab Key to go out of the node group we now have everything finished so I can press the N key to close the side panel so here it is the procedural Moss is finished so we have the Moss Shader we also have the Moss only and then we have all the different settings for the Moss then we also have the material underneath so if you have some other material that you want to add you can just add it right in here for instance if you've purchased my ultimate procedural material pack you can just open up blender's asset browser and select the ultimate procedural materials then here on the search you can just search for the dirt Shader and just to add the procedural dirt Shader into the blend file I can just add some object here like a cube and I can just drag and drop this dirt onto this Cube so I can now just delete this object because we don't actually need it and I can go back here to the shading and then if I just select them all I can press shift a I can go to the search and I can search for the dirt so let's just drop the dirt Shader here so this is the procedural dirt Shader and so then I can just take the Shader and I can put that into the material underneath and then we can also turn the scale up to be able to see that better so let's maybe turn this up to like a three and I could also make this a bit darker if I want it to be like a darker dirt color so now it looks like some dirt with some moss on top so you can really just add any material and you can put it here into the material underneath and that will make the moss growing on that material so thank you so much for watching this tutorial I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you found it useful and I hope you learned a lot from it and if you'd like to help support me and my channel then you can purchase this procedural material on my gumroad store and my patreon page and also the blender Market links to that will be in the description and if you'd like to purchase more of my materials you can also check out my blender procedural material packs and you can also check out my ultimate procedural material pack which has all of my procedural materials pre-set up in blender's asset browser with custom thumbnails sorted catalogs and customizable node groups and if you'd like to learn how to create any of my procedural materials you can also check out my blender procedural material tutorial playlist here on YouTube but I hope you enjoyed this and thank you for watching