Most impactful materials you see in visual media have some emotional value that comes beyond their direct visual representation. A piece of porcelain that is perfectly smooth and smooth will have a somewhat “sterile” feel to it, whereas a piece of porcelain that has a crackling pattern all over will immediately read as “fragile”, “old” and perhaps even “nostalgic”. That’s not because of the texture maps, that’s because we know the real-world material, how it’s handled and how it changes over time. And so, when we recreate a surface, it’s not just about simulating the visual properties of the surface, but also deciding which part of its history we want to tell to our audience. A ship hull covered in rust reads “weathered” and “derelict”, while a freshly cut block of marble reads “clean” and “timeless”. And I think the most successful digital materials are the ones that do make conscious decisions about which history to convey.
Because the perceived meaning of that surface will change depending on the age of the viewer. To an older person, the look of worn brass may evoke notions of warmth and tradition, of something that has been treasured and handled with care for generations. To a younger person, the same look may evoke notions of grime and industrial neglect. This kind of generational difference in reading surfaces happens at a subconscious level, and for that reason materials are an extremely powerful narrative element. When artists don’t take this into account, they end up with work that is compositionally perfect but ultimately lacks resonance. You have to decide whether this brass was worn this way because it was lovingly handled for many years or because it was dragged behind a truck for a few miles. That will have a much greater effect on how your audience reacts than any increase in shader resolution.
One of the most powerful tools for emphasizing or downplaying emotion is lighting. That same weathered wood, viewed in the soft warm light of early morning, seems warm and cozy. Caught in the noonday glare, the same wood is abrasive and emotionless. Knowing how surfaces respond to light makes it possible to influence emotional impact. One of the reasons that so many professional artists have a definite preferred lighting for their work is that they have discovered how to expose the emotional impact of their subject surfaces most effectively. They know which materials work best in bright noonday light, which ones shine in the golden hour, which ones come to life in overcast diffusion, and which ones are best expressed with the soft glow of candle light or the cold glare of neon light.
Many of the most effective materials are paradoxical. The shine on a surface that seems mirror smooth at a distance but shows deep scars at a close one, yields an intensity that gives the impression of having been made by a human hand. A polished silver surface in which we can see the reflection of the world outside but which seems slightly scuffed up on a micro-level seems more tangible, more real than a silver surface that presents us with a perfect mirror image. Such subtle paradoxes recall the way objects in the real world are never just one thing, are always still permeated with other layers of information. Artists who allow for this instead of scrubbing it out, give their materials a psychological complexity. We respond to surfaces that seem conflicted, scratched, or subtly paradoxical in ways we cannot fully articulate but which reveal the human quality of the objects before us.
It is through this kind of practical experience that you can become aware of the emotional language of materials, and not by using a script or any other technical trick. By simply observing how your emotional condition is affected by touching different materials, by hearing the silent narratives that the objects that surround you at home whisper. This way you will develop an emotional radar that will guide your material choices, something you will never achieve by taking a tutorial. And it will help you create materials that transmit a feeling to the viewer before they can even consciously judge their realism. This is one of the most difficult and desirable qualities that any material artist can have in an industry dominated by discussions on the subject of photorealism and rendering time.
