Author: Artofwot
Designed for: Blender 2.34
Level: Beginner
Last Updated: August 4th, 2004

What Are Materials?
First I would like to explain why I am so many beginner tutorials right now. The main reason is that later on I would like to be able to get into quite advanced topics. Instead of having to explain basic subjects such as animation in the middle of the tutorial, I would just like to be able to say, "Please see our _______ in ________ Tutorial for more information".

Secondly, I would like to apologize for the lack of tutorials recently. I know I've said this before, but the tutorials will be appearing more quickly over the summer. Part of the fact that I will be able to speed things up a little, is that I have been able to recruit various volunteers to help me. (If you'd like to help, e-mail me at tutorials@fanfilmengine.com.)

Now I can continue with the tutorial. Materials are what give an object, such as a sphere, plane, or other shape a color, brightness, etc. Without a material, the object is just an object. Blender assigns a default material which is a gray to objects when you create them.  This is the default behavior for the majority of 3D modeling and animation packages.

Textures are a sort of further section of materials. They add something to the material. Materials and Textures are what we're going to be focusing on today, so it is very important to understand the difference between the two. When we begin to work with them, it will become clearer as to what the difference is.

Creating A Blank Scene
Please fire up Blender. I'm assuming that you understand how to do this by now. We are presented by the default scene. We're going to create a completely blank scene. If you do a render by pressing F12, and it appears to be completely black, just bypass the next section. Press "X" on your keyboard. A menu should come up like the one in Figure 1. Select "Selected" (This is the only option for now).

Figure 1:  The "Erase" menu.

If the square (It's actually a cube) did not go away, make sure that before you hit "CTRL"-"X" it was selected (it's edges were a pink color), like the one in Figure 2.

Figure 2: The cube selected.

We're not done yet. If you do a render (Press F12), you'll see that our background is bluish. At the bottom of the 3D window (the window with the 3D grid), click on the button that looks like a sphere (#1 in Figure 3.). Then, over to the right of that button, click on the button that looks like an earth (#2 in Figure 3). We are now looking at the "World" buttons.

Figure 3: The two steps you need to take to access the "World" buttons.

This is where we can adjust the color of the "horizon".  The "horizon" is how Blender refers to the background. Take the all of the sliders that are highlighted in red in Figure 4 and drag them all the way to 0. Make sure you do this to all of them, both the ones on the left and the ones on the right. If you are successful, you should see the preview window to your left (The big square that used to be blue) turn to black.

Figure 4: The horizon and zenith sliders.

Now, go look back into the area with the grid. There should be something on it that looks like a target (Figure 5).  This is actually a lamp.  To delete this, right-click on it. It should turn purple.

Figure 5: A lamp.

Press "X" on your keyboard, and a menu identical to the one you saw earlier should appear. Select "Erase Selected" (It's still the only choice). Now, I like to have my camera facing frontwards, so let's delete the camera that we have now by selecting it by right-clicking, pressing "X", and selecting "Erase Selected". Press "1" on your number pad (it's the thing way over on the right of your keyboard). Now, press "Spacebar" to bring up Blender's toolbox, click on "Add", and then on "Camera" as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6: The "Add" Menu with "Camera" selected.

This will add a camera looking in the direction you are looking in. To make sure that you start with this scene when you start up blender next time, press "CTRL"-"U" on your keyboard. Select "Save User Defaults" (Again, this is the only option). We are done setting up a blank scene.

Getting Started
Now we can finally get started! For now, let's just see how textures work. Go into Camera View by pressing 0 (Zero, not "O") on your number pad, which is way over to the right on your keyboard. Press "Spacebar" to bring up blenders tool box, click on "Add", and then "Mesh", and then "Plane" as shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7: The "Add" menu again, but this time with "Plane" selected.

You've now placed a plane that is perpendicular to the camera. However, you cannot see it. This is because the plane was placed behind the camera. Press "3" on the number pad to get to the side view. Press "TAB" to put the plane into "Object Mode". This will allow you to manipulate the object as a whole, and not the individual vertice. Press "G", and then drag the plane until it is next to the camera's widest point. Click to put it in that position (See Figure 8).

Figure 8: Moving the plane close to the camera.

Make sure that you have the plane selected. Next, let's go to the material buttons by pressing F5, or do the following: Press the button that looks like a gray sphere (#1 in Figure 9). Then the other button (Shown in #2 in Figure 9) that looks like a red sphere.

Figure 9: Getting to the materials buttons.

Now, you won't see many buttons yet, and right now, only the default gray material is assigned to the plane. Click the "Add New" button (Figure 10).

Figure 10: The "Add New" button.

Now there should be lots of buttons in the window. I'm going to remind you that we are not going to talk about every single button in the materials section, we're just going to give you an overview of what you can adjust and how to adjust it.

Adjusting The Color Of A Material

First of all, in order to be able to see the object with the material without a light, we need to press the "Shadeless" button (Figure 11).

Figure 12: The "Shadless" button.

One important thing you need to know, is how to preview how the texture is going to look like on the object. The buttons and windows shown in Figure 13 will help you to accomplish this task.

Figure 14: The preview buttons and windows.

Let's go over these buttons, because previewing is an extremely important part of designing and assigning materials and textures. The largest box is where you can preview your materials and textures. The buttons on the right side are what we're going to talk about. If you press the buttons, it will not become obvious what they do, because you have turned "Shadeless" on. What those buttons do, is that they map your preview texture or material to an object that doesn't exist.  It just lets you preview what your texture will look like on three different shapes: a flat plane, a sphere, and a cube. The fourth button down allows you to switch between a light and dark background for the preview. The last button allows you to refresh the preview window.

Now, we're going to adjust the color of the plane. The color of the plane can be controlled with the buttons shown in Figure 14.

Figure 14: The buttons that control the color of the material.

What we're going to look at first, are the three sliders that say "R", "G", and "B". All of these letters have a value next to them. These sliders allow you to adjust the amount of "Red", "Green", and "Blue" in the color (R stands for red, G stands for Green, and B stands for Blue). Drag the sliders to increase or decrease the amount of color. A value of 1.000 is the highest value of a color that you can get, and 0.000 is the lowest. Using these three sliders you can create absolutely any color.

There are two ways to change the value of a color:
1. Click and drag on the slider or number.
2. Press the shift key and click on one of the values.  You can now type an exact number.

As you drag and release the sliders, notice that the preview window we discussed above changes you reflect the modifications that you have made. The "A" slider adjusts the transparency of your material. "A" stands for "Alpha". A value of 1 means that there is no transparency in your object. A value of 0 means that your object is completely transparent, and you can't see it.

You can further adjust the color of the material by using the "Hue", "Saturation", and "Value" buttons. These aren't displayed right now, but you can activate them by clicking on the "HSV" button (Figure 15).

Figure 15: The HSV button you need to click to activate the HSV sliders (the HSV sliders are highlighted in blue) are highlighted in red.

I'm not going to get into using the HSV buttons right now, but just make sure that you know that they are there. Please switch back to the RGB buttons by clicking on the RGB button which is next to the HSV button. We're going to assign an orange material to the plane. Take the "R" slider, and make it's value 1.000. Take the "G" slider, and put it about halfway at .5 (you may want to enter the value yourself), and drag the "B" slider all the way to 0. Your sliders should look like the ones in Figure 16.

Figure 16: RGB values for an orange color.

As you can see, the preview window is now showing an orange color. If you do a quick render by pressing F12, you can see that the camera is now looking at an orange plane with no shading, like Figure 17.

Figure 17: The render window.

Adjusting Other Basic Properties Of A Material
I would now like you to disable "Shadeless" by clicking on the "Shadeless" button again, as shown back in Figure 12. We're going to be adjusting properties that won't display if we keep shadeless on. I would like to direct your attention to the buttons shown in Figure 18.

Figure 18:The "Shaders" palette.

By using these buttons and sliders, you can simulate different materials, such as plastic. You can do this mostly by using the Spec, and Hard sliders. Let's work from the top down. On the top left is the pull down menu selection button that now says "Lambert". These are different types of diffuse shaders (Figure 19).

Figure 19: The three different diffuse shaders that are currently part of Blender 2.33.

There are currently three different diffuse shaders that are part of Blender 2.33. They are: Toon, oren-nayar, and lambert. I mostly use Lambert for my work. Shaders allow you to "Shade" the image or objects differently. Underneath these buttons is the "Ref" slider. To really explain how this works, let's assign a new RGB value to our material. Let's give all of the sliders (R, G, and B) a value of 1. This should give us a white. However, as you see, it appears to be more of a gray (Figure 20) except for the specular highlight (we'll get into the specular highlight later).

Figure 20: The value of this color is R=1, B=1, and G=1. This is actually a white color.

There are other types of shaders called "Specular Shaders". There are four specular shaders currently part of Blender 2.33. They are: Toon, blinn, phong, and cooktorr. Each shader will give you different options, but you should usually leave cooktorr shader as the specular shader (For more information on shaders, I suggest that you consult the Blender 2.3 Guide). The spec slider controls the "Strength of specularity". Basicly, the slider adjusts the brightness of the specularity of the material. To demonstrate specularity, let's add a light, by pressing Spacebar > Add > Light. Press "G" to move the light around in the scene, and place it before our plane. Click to place the light. Now, go to side view (3 on your number pad), and select the camera by right clicking on it. Press G to move it, and move it a little bit farther away from the plane. Drag the "Spec" slider all the way to zero. Do a quick render by pressing F12. It should look like Figure 21.

Figure 21:
A render with 0 value for the "Spec" slider.

Now, drag the "Spec" slider all the way to 2, and do a render by pressing F12. Depending on where you placed your lamp, it should look like Figure 22.

Figure 22:
A render with the "Spec" slider at 2. The specular highlight is outlined in red.

The specular highlight marks where the light from a lightsource bounces off an object and into the viewing plane (the camera). Please look at Figure 23. The path of the light from the lightsource to the object is indicated in red, and the path of the light from the object to the viewing plane (the camera) is indicated in Blue.

Figure 23:
The path of light.

The hard slider controls the "hardness" of the specularity. A high value creates a tight, small point of specularity, while a smaller value creates a large "sheen". Let's skip the "Translucency" slider right now, and continue on to the "Amb" slider. The ambient slider controls how much ambient light the object picks up. You can specify the color and amount of ambient light in the world settings, so navigate to the world buttons using the method described near the beginning of the tutorial. Take a look at the sliders that are highlighted in Figure 24.

Figure 24:
The ambient light sliders highlighted in red.

You can adjust the color of the ambient light using the AmbR, AmbG, and AmbB sliders as you would adjusting the color of a material. Switch back to the material buttons. A higher value in the "Amb" slider will result in the object picking up more of the ambient light. Figure 25 shows an orange material, and the highest value in the "Amb" slider, so that the material is picking up a lot of the ambient light (I set the ambient light color to green). As you can see, the plane is pretty much completely green.

Figure 25:
A render of a plane with an orange material. The plane is picking up a lot of the ambient light that is floating around.

The emit slider allows you to have the object emit light when you do a radiosity calculation (we're not going to get into that right now).

Assigning A Material To Another Object

To demonstrate how to add the material to another object, please add a sphere by pressing Spacebar>Add>UVSphere.  Press OK on both of the prompt boxes that come up. Press the Tab key to get the object into object mode. Make sure that the sphere is selected (it should be wireframe and a pinkish color), and go to the material buttons. Instead of pressing the "Add New" button, click on the arrows next to it (Figure 26).

Figure 26:
Click the button that is highlighted in red, and the menu in Figure 27 pops up.

A menu like Figure 27 should pop up.

Figure 27:
A list of materials in the scene, as well as an add new button.

What we are seeing in Figure 27 is a list of the materials in the scene, as well as an "Add New" button.  Select the "Material" button (in most cases the name will be different). The material should now be applied to your sphere and your plane. Figure 28 shows a render.

Figure 28:
A render of a plane and a sphere sharing the same material.

The last thing we will do (which is sort of out of place) is name our material. Shift-click on the input box that is highlighted in red in Figure 29, and enter a name for your material. Press ENTER.

Closing Words

Congratulations. You now have the knowledge to create your very own material. The tutorial was divided into parts because it is becoming very large. The next part will deal with adding and modifying textures. It should be coming soon.

On behalf of FanFilmEngine.com, "Good luck with your Blender career".

Ronald Hill
artofwot

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