How do I modify a procedural mud material from Blender 2.79 to 3.3?

Question

I'm following this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfc3LwNI_aY

As can be read in the comments, the setup doesn't work for recent versions of Blender, and I'd be incredibly grateful for advise on how to do something similar in 3.3? The entire node tree can be viewed in two parts from 6.31 min and forward (I've only attached a picture of half the node tree!).

5.18 in a noise texture + a voronoi texture are exchanged to an image texture too quickly for me to understand what type of image it is — but that shouldn't have anything to do with the problems I get. My results are differing long before that and his result is good also with noise + voronoi.

Answer 1

The linked video of the question is not so much a tutorial as an experiment. It's hard to follow because the values get changed all the time and there is an image texture used that is not available for download. And Blender 2.79 is used. So you have to make some of the settings with a sense of proportion. But you can have something similar in Blender 3.3 ...

A delicious mud ball!

In the video, Blender 2.79 is used and since Blender 2.80 the GUI has changed. So everything looks a bit different. Also, in Blender 2.81 a few nodes have been changed, especially the Voronoi node. But you can replicate them in Blender 2.81+. Related links:

• video: When You Update Blender... (Old Procedural Texture Transfer)
• video: Blender 2.81 : Procedural Shader Nodes & Voronoi Updates
• question: How to get old Mapping and Voronoi nodes into Blender 2.82?

So, for the mud ball in Blender 3.3 you need the following ...

• the default cube with a level 6 Subdivision Surface modifier to have enough geometry for the displacement
• Cycles because the displacement of the material only works in Cycles. In Eevee, you could use the Displacement modifier with a baked texture.
• in the material settings, set Settings > Surface > Displacement to Displacement and Bump to make the displacement work
• in the Shader Editor, you need to add a Displacement node and use its Height value. Use a low value like 0.050 for the Scale input
• a replacement for the Voronoi (Intensity) node is a Voronoi node plus a Math (Power) node to multiply the Distance value with itself.
• because the 2-meter default cube is used we need to have a Mapping node to scale the texture a bit (Scale group). If you have a smaller object then you need to adjust these values and the Scale input of the Displacement node.

All other nodes and their values are the same as shown in the video before the final optimization, except the Image Texture for the Bump in the Water group. Here a Noise and Voronoi node are used as shown earlier in the video. I did not compare the values shown in the video with the final optimization and skipped it because the result looked nice to me.

Have fun with the mud!