Soulburn Studios Art Lessons

Leather Material
By Neil Blevins
Created On: June 15th 2005
Updated On: Dec 6th 2024
Software: Blender or 3dsmax (vray) or 3dsmax (scanline)

Here's a tutorial on how to create a basic leather material.

Reference

Here's the material we are trying to emulate in CG. Here's a black leather chair I grabbed from here.

Reference 1

Here's a leather pouch that I grabbed from here.

Reference 2

Software Agnostic Material

The basic ingredients are as follows:

Shading: Standard Diffuse and Spec model
Color: whatever color of leather you're after.
Spec: low gloss reflections (blurry), low intensity
Bump: Perlin noise mixed with a cellular noise

Ways to make it more realistic:

Replace the procedural noise with a triplanar with a more complex bitmap of a real leather texture.

Here's the geometry I'll be using for the material tests:

Blender Example

Here's the shader for Blender...

To start, set the base color in the Principled BSDF to the color of your leather.

For the spec, I set it to a bout halfway roughness to get a reasonably blurry specular reflection.

The bump is split into 2 parts. I am mixing a bump that creates little leather like cells, and a noisy bump that creates micro detail. See the 3 images below, the first image plus the second image equals the third.

So to create the cells, I use a Voronoi Texture, run it through a Color Ramp to give me finer level clamping control, and then hook it into a Multiply so I have control over how strong that part of the pattern is. I then use a Noise Texture for the noisy bump, again hooked into a Color Ramp and a Multiply to let me control it's strength. Both noises are hooked into a Texture Coordinate node set to Object, to project the noises in 3d space. I then add the results of the two noises with the Math node to to Add, plug that into a Bump, reduce the strength of the bump, and hook that into my main material.

Here's the resulting render.

Here's the blend file, Blender 4.2: leather_material_blender.zip

3dsmax (vray) Example

Here's the shader for 3dsmax for the vray renderer renderer.

I start with a VrayMtl. I made the Diffuse color to brown.

For the spec I set the Glossiness to 0.6 and the Reflection to light grey, to give a reasonably blurry and somewhat strong specular reflection.

Now comes the bump, I chose a combination of a cellular texture and a fractal noise, then reduced the amount from 30 to 14, so the bump is more subtle.

Here's a cellular texture, a noise, and then combining the two with a mix.

Here's the resulting render.

Here's the max file, 3dsmax 2022: leather_material_3dsmax_vray.zip

3dsmax (scanline) Example

Here's the shader for 3dsmax for the scanline renderer.

For the color, I just added a regular brown, but you could also use a bitmap if you wanted more variation to the color.

Next comes the highlight, Blinn with a wide base, but a medium height.

Figure 4a

Now comes the bump, I chose a combination of a cellular texture and a fractal noise, then reduced the amount from 30 to 14, so the bump is more subtle.

Here's a cellular texture, a noise, and then combining the two with a mix.

And here's the final result...

Here's the max file, 3dsmax 2022: leather_material_3dsmax_scanline.zip