ResPower Education Center: Blender, Part II - An Introduction to Materials

Figure 1: My scene.

Figure 2: The shading panel button.

Figure 3: The materials panel.

Figure 4: Renaming the material.

Figure 5: Scene so far.

Figure 6: Dull red material.

Figure 7: Shiny, transparent blue material.

Figure 8: The finished scene.

Overview

The second installment for Blender in the ResPower Education center covers basic materials. The article assumes the reader is at least comfortable with the material presented in the last article and will build on concepts presented there.

Objects For Your Materials

It is possible to create materials in Blender without actually assigning them to any objects, but any materials not assigned to an object are lost if the program is closed, even if you save your scene. On top of that, we want to actually see our materials in action, so we will be assigning them to objects.

Blender has two render engines that come packaged with it by default: Blender Internal, and Yafray. Both engines have strong and weak points, and each actually has some specific ways to created materials, but I will be covering the Blender Internal engine here. Yafray's materials aren't difficult to use, so just play around with the render engine set to Yafray if you want to try them out. Blender comes with the Blender Internal engine set by default, so simply hitting F12 renders with it.

Let's get started. Open Blender and you will see the default cube. Keep it, and add in a sphere somewhere in the scene. We are going to make a reflective surface, a dull surface, and a shiny, translucent surface. My scene is pictured in figure 1. The first thing you may notice is that new objects are all gray. Blender doesn't give your new objects any material by default, so they start out gray. The default cube has a default material on it that is, surprisingly enough, gray. This material is called "Material". Very original.

Materials

Let's create a material. Select the ground plane by right-clicking it while in object mode. Now, press F5 or click the icon with the little sphere in the header in the bottom pane to get to the shading panel. The icon is pictured in figure 2. Now you should see a pane labeled "Materials" much like figure 3. We want to give our floor plane a new material, so click the button that says "Add New". Blender creates a material and gives it a name, probably something like "Material.001". Click on the name and change it to something like "green floor". The result should look like figure 4. This doesn't magically make the floor green or anything, we've just changed the name. There are three color swatches down below the name that are labeled Col, Spec, and Mir. These correspond the the Color, Specular (shiny) color, and Mirror color. Changing the Color obviously changes the color of the material itself. Changing the Specular color changes the color of the shiny spots on your material. Changing the Mirror color changes the color of the mirror itself. So, changing the Mirror color to red will make everything reflected in the mirror have a red tint. Go ahead and change the color of the material to a bright green and change the specular color to bright yellow. You will notice the floor plane becomes green in the 3d view. We are going to make our floor reflective so in the pane that has a tab that reads "Mirror Transp" select the button that says "Ray Mirror" so that it becomes dark. Now move the slider with the label "RayMir" to about 0.75. This will make the surface roughly 75% reflective. Rendering at this point yields something like figure 5.

Now we will make our dull surface. Select the cube while in object mode and give it a new material if it doesn't have one. Now just mirror the settings from figure 6. Select the sphere, and mirror the settings from figure 7. Figure 7 looks a little different because I dragged the panes for "Mirror Transp" and "Shaders" apart into two separate panes instead of one tabbed pane. But the settings should still be the same in each.

To see what you've done so far, render with F12. You will probably notice that the sphere looks a little weird. There are lots of little facets, and the specular reflection isn't very nice. Blender makes a distinction between objects that are "Solid" (facted") and "Smooth" (not faceted). To change the sphere to smooth, go to the Editing panel by pressing F9. In the "Link and Materials" pane near the bottom is a button that says "Set Smooth." Click this button. You will notice that it does not stay selected, but the sphere in the 3d view is no longer faceted. Now render and you will get the final product, figure 8.

Since seeing a finished product is sometimes as informative as being told the steps to get there, I am posting the .blend file here for your convenience.

Conclusion

Blender has many, many, many more options when it comes to materials. A single object can have multiple materials. A material can have multiple textures associated with it that each affects different attributes of the material. Materials can even be controlled with scripting through Python. Hopefully we can cover some of these topics in later articles here in the ResPower Education Center. While this has been a very basic introduction to materials in Blender, using the information here, you can create any number of interesting materials for use in your scenes. Thanks for reading, and check back for new entries very soon.

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