When did I start learning CG?
I started when I was 13 years old.
I had been fascinated by the graphics behind films and video games, and I decided to download Blender.
I began spending most of my evenings learning it, and it became a growing passion.
Why do I like shading?
After around one year, I had spent most of my time learning how to model. I had my eye on shading initially, but it felt inaccessible for quite a while.
After becoming familiar with Blender, I decided to dive into shading, and I started to experiment with noise - and later, vector math.
Do you teach shading?
Yes!
I have hours worth of videos on some of my most advanced shaders.
With my most recent videos, I aim to show some of the tricks I use in my own shading. As well as the creative process behind it.
One of my recent videos, the snow simulator, has an in-depth breakdown of my process.
On top of videos, I help out with general Blender problems through discord and share my work in some procedural servers.
One of my first real renders. I made it around half a year into learning Blender
CMZW has one of the most inspiring procedural shading channels I’ve seen.
Check out CMZW’s channel here
The shader shown here is slightly deceptive. As I’m using node grouping tools, it’s many times larger than it appears on screen.
What makes it procedural?
The images made with procedural shaders aren’t “drawn“ by hand.
They are made by layering transformations (in the form of nodes)
These nodes set the procedures that build up the shader.
The advantage of this approach is its flexibility, which allows us to change the parameters of these rules at any time and at any place along the chain of procedures.
Where can I learn shading at an advanced level?
The answer is YouTube! (mostly)
You can find all kinds of teaching bubbles on YouTube, and matching your requirements in shading might be difficult at first. After enough videos, you get a great reference for what you can do with the tool.
The longer answer is through social spheres like servers and subreddits. Some are dedicated to advanced shading showcases and provide a more direct connection to the pros than YouTube can.
What is your biggest shader?
My largest shaders have over one thousand individual nodes.
My CGboost logo has around 1800 nodes, and multiple others have reached over 1.5k.
Large shaders like these come with expected downsides.
They’re far more prone to crash or break in some way, and they can take a week to create.
Outside of that, I don’t actually see huge shaders as a good thing.
Most of my work in shading relies on optimization, and finding combinations of mathematical tools that save me an enormous amount of time.
Along with practice for speed, I use a custom shortcut system that I haven’t seen others use, which allows me to add up to 20 commonly used nodes within seconds.
My YouTube channel page here
What does a node do?
A single shader node contains information.
Some nodes are designed to take an input, manipulate it, and return an output.
Other nodes provide the information to manipulate. Like a coordinate system, usually the start of most shaders.
A node can also contain the information of an image texture, so you don’t need to craft all of your textures by hand.
The color of a node denotes the kind of information it works with. Green nodes are used for shading information, yellow nodes for color, purple nodes for vectors, and gray nodes for numeric values.