Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Quickie Material

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This tutorial was created using Blender v2.49

[edit] Your First Material

If you open the default scene in Blender, the cube has a material already. All material settings are made in the Shading buttons, the basic material settings are done in the Material buttons.

The default material has a simple grey color. It is linked to the Mesh (ME button), not to the object directly. You can see that the mesh has only one material in use, and that you are editing this material (1 Mat 1).

Delete a material

Click the next to MA:Material in the Links and Pipelines panel to delete the link to the datablock. This removes the material from the mesh, removes several tabs from the Button window, and removes a lot of information from the Material panel and replaces it with an Add New button. You could click that to create a new material, but what we want to do is reapply the old material to it.

Apply an existing material

Click the button that looks like this:. You'll see a drop-down list and you want to choose "Material". This nifty drop-down will list all of the materials you've created thus far and let you apply them to any mesh or object in the scene. Choose the one called "O Material" (which is the same material that was originally on the cube). The "0" in front shows that zero users are using this material.

Note: Unused materials in the Material List (those with a 0 in front of them) are deleted once a Blend project is saved and reopened. Hence, if you wish to delete a material from the Material List... save and re-open the project.

[edit] Meaningful Names

"Material" isn't a very creative name for a material. What is worse than the lack of creativity is the difficulty of finding a specific material in a large scene using dozens of materials with names like "Material.001, 002, 003 ...". There are a couple of different ways to rename the link to a material.

1. Press the automatic name button that looks like a little car . This will automatically give your material the name of the color currently assigned to it. For example: if the color of the material is currently grey, which is the default color, the word grey will appear in the material name space. If you have changed the color, the name of your chosen color will appear. This is a quick option for when you don't have time to give the material a unique name.
2. Press LMB over the material name, and the existing name will be highlighted. You can now type a new name for the material, or Press LMB again to place the text cursor and add to the existing name. Rename the material to "Green Ooze".

Note:Your materials will be much easier to find, and manage later when you give them brief, descriptive names you can recognize at a glance.

[edit] Setting the Color

Obviously, just changing the name of the material doesn't make the material green. We have to do some work on it still.

• You set a color with the RGB color sliders (Img. 2a).
• You can also LMB click on the number and type in the value directly.

• The most comfortable way to change the color is to LMB click on the color itself (Img. 2b), where you get a full fledged color selection panel including a sample Pipette to choose colors from any Blender window, including the rendering window (Img. 2c, 5).

• Set the R value to 0.149, the G value to 1.000, and the B value to 0.446.

R, G and B of course stand for red, green and blue respectively. By mixing these values, any color can be achieved. The Col value is the basic color of the material. Spec(ularity) is the faked reflection of a light source (like a lamp bulb) on an object. Mir is the mirror color for true reflections.

Physically most materials don't change the color of reflected light, so Spec and Mir may normally be left at their default values (white). A notable and important exception is metals. They do change the color of reflected light. We're not doing a physics course here, so we're going to set the Spec color to what we like.

• Click the button marked Spec.

The color dialog can now be used to adjust the specular color. Keep your eyes on the Preview of the material and start messing with the R, G, and B sliders.

• Set the specular color to R = 0.640, G = 0.990, and B = 0.566.

With this value we should be able to get a good ooze down the road. The colour preview and settings should now look similar to this:

There are a lot of other material buttons. We will discuss some of them eventually. For examples on how to achieve a certain effect see Every Material Known to Man.

• Keep this file open and go to the next tutorial, where we will perfect the ooze.