Stylized Tree Shader Tutorial

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Learn a bunch of stuff about shading by making an excessively fancy tree leaf shader! Our subject is a spherical tree that will get custom radial Normals, mixed colors, and much more. We'll try to keep it compatible with Instancing and Scattering, but this tutorial isn't about those.

You do not need a huge amount of shader node knowledge to follow along, but this is probably above absolute beginners. There's lots of good foundational information like how to balance lights, map ranges, and mix colors. Also advanced stuff like lifting Normal Map details and applying them to Custom Normals via Surface Gradients!

Project Files on Gumroad here ($2)

Topics:

  • Balancing the Sun Light

  • How World Lighting affects shading

  • Basic and advanced Radial/Sphereical Normals

  • Faking Sun Angle in the material

  • Making fake shading (Lambert Shading)

  • Lots of color mixing and effects

  • Leaf Texture (alpha and Normal Map)

  • Randomized UVs

  • Getting Random Per Island in Eevee via Geometry Nodes

  • Compensating for Object transforms in Object based Normals

  • Mixing Noise into Normals for variety

  • Using Surface Gradients to combine Normal Maps and Custom Normals

  • Faking tree density with Object Coords

  • Using AO to darken and brighten things

  • Distance from Camera based masks

  • Tons of other random stuff.