Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Quickie Material

In this module, you will create a new material called "green ooze". Along the way, you will learn how to alter the diffuse, specular, and mirror colors of a material.

Your First Material

Figure 1: The Materials tab in the Properties panel.

The cube in the default scene (which you get from File → Load Factory Settings) has a simple grey color. Now click on the Materials tab in the Properties panel.

The materials tab contains various menus, but for now you only need diffuse, specular and mirror. The material is named and linked in the panel above the preview window. (Linking is a feature that allows materials to be shared between multiple objects (or datablocks). Changing a material affects the appearance of everything it is linked to.)

The first row of the window above the preview window indicates that:

• there is one material assigned to this object and its name is "Material".

The second row of controls indicates that:

• The current selected material's name is "Material".
• This material will only be saved if it`s in use.
• It is not a "Nodes" material.
• Instead of being linked directly to an object, the current material is linked to a datablock.

To rename the material, click  LMB  on the name and enter the name you want.

To unlink the material, click  LMB  on the X button to the right of the material name ("Material"). This deletes the link to the datablock, removing the material from the mesh. As a side-effect, most of the panels in the Material tab disappear. You will see in a moment, however, that the material still exists. It hasn't been deleted; it is simply no longer in use.

At this point, you could click  LMB  the "New" button to create a new material, but instead we are going to reapply the old material:

1. Click  LMB  on the button to the left of the "New" button.
2. You'll see a nifty drop-down list containing all materials you've created so far. Choose 0 Material.

Materials whose names are preceded by "0" in this list are not in use. By default, Blender doesn't save such materials when it saves the scene. Thus, you can delete a material from the list by saving the scene and then reopening it. You can override this behavior by toggling the "F" button "on" for unused materials you want saved.

Your materials will be much easier to find and manage if you give them brief, descriptive names you can recognize at a glance. Change this one's name to "Green Ooze".

Specifying Colors

Since changing the name of the material doesn't change its properties, you still have some work to do.

Simple materials are specified by three colors: diffuse, specular and mirror. White rectangulars in their own panel in the Material tab allow you to access these three colors one at a time. Diffuse color is the basic underlying color of the material, rendered by the diffuse shader. Specular color is for highlights (small bright spots on a shiny surface) as rendered by the specular shader. Mirror color is for true reflections rendered using ray-tracing.

• You can specify a color by its red, green, and blue components. By mixing different amounts of red ("R"), green ("G"), and blue ("B"), you can get any color that a computer monitor can display. 0.000 means none of the component, and 1.000 means the maximum amount of the component. For instance, R=1.000, G=1.000, B=1.000 produces white.

If you click on the white rectangular under the diffuse panel you can use the RGB color wheel or the color sliders to change the values. This is the most intuitive way. The window that pops out will look like this and will include the following (Figure 4):

Figure 2: colorwheel

1. A color wheel to change the color as you want.
2. Three color sliders that will change if you change the color in the colorwheel. You can also change the values with the sliders.
3. An slider that controlls the intensity of the color.
4. A pipette capable of sampling colors from any Blender window or render window.
5. Buttons that can change it to "HSV" or "HEX" mode.

• Alternatively you can specify hue, saturation and value components by clicking LMB on the "HSV" button and pushing the sliders around accordingly.

• You can also press the last button and enter the hexadecimal (or HEX) code.

If you want to get rid of the window just click  LMB  anywhere else.

The most used method of creating a color of your own is using the color wheel, but because we want to be sure you will get the exact same color as us we will use the sliders. Use the above methods to set the diffuse color to R=0.149, G=1.000, B=0.446 (or use the HEX code: 6CFFB2). If you look in the "Preview" panel, you will see that the material is now bright green.

Most real-life materials (other than metals) don't alter the color of specular light. For this reason, Specular and Mirror are usually left at their default values (white). For green ooze, however, you'll disregard this rule-of-thumb:

1. Click  LMB  the sample rectangle below the Specular window.
2. Use the color selection dialog to adjust the specular color and watch the Preview panel to see how this color affects the sample sphere's highlight.
3. Set the specular color to R=0.640, G=0.990, B=0.566 (or use the HEX code: D1FEC6).

With these values for Color and Specular, you should be able to get a good ooze later on. The Preview, Diffuse and Specular panel should now look like this:

As you can see, there are many other material buttons. Many of these will be explained in later modules. Suggestions for creating specific materials may be found in the "Every Material Known to Man" module.

Save this scene before proceeding. You will need it for the "Quickie Texture" module, in which you will perfect your ooze.

Additional Resources

• HSL and HSV at Wikipedia.
• RGB color model at Wikipedia.
• How to Assign a Different Material to Each Face of a Cube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCYViRJFf5w

This tutorial was created using Blender v2.59