19: Monstrous Materials

Learning Target

• Create materials that use a variety of shaders
• Use textures to alter the appearance of a material

Blender Reference

Common keystrokes for selection modes:

Common keystrokes for selecting things:

Instructions

Step 1:

Choose one of the following templates to begin with:

Download the corresponding .blend file for your chosen template.

Step 2: 

Open the file in Blender and add a base material to the object. 

Save your Blender project now into your H: drive so that it will autosave periodically!

Step 3:

Add at least 4 more material slots to your object.

Then, create new materials for each slot using the New button. Also, rename the materials so they make sense. Some examples might be:

Eyes, Body, Nails, Teeth, Arms, Legs, Horns, Beak, Feathers, etc  

Save your Blender project whenever you do a major step using CTRL+S. You don't want to lose any work!

Step 4:

Enter Edit Mode using the TAB key. Then, assign materials to the desired faces of the mesh.

• • Choose a material
  • Select a group of faces on the mesh
  • Click the assign button

Step 5:

Now, it's time to increase the visual interest and/or realism of your materials.

Switch to the Shading workspace.

If you have an object and material selected, you should see something like this:

For at least one of your materials, add an image texture to the color channel.

You can find thousands of textures by searching online. For example:

Note: It's a good idea to include "tiled" or "seamless" in your search so that there aren't visible seams in your material.

You can search for new nodes to insert by pressing F3:

Or, you can find them in the Add menu:

To add a texture to your material, build a node system. We will do these steps:

• • Get a generated set of coordinates for applying the 2D texture to a 3D surface
  • Adjust the mapping of these coordinates
  • Choose the image texture to use
  • Use the texture for the shader's color
  • Output the shader results to the surface of the material

You can use the mapping node to:

• • shift the texture left, right, up, down as needed
  • rotate the texture
  • change the size of the texture

Step 6:

For at least one of your materials, add a bump map texture. Choose the object and material you want to edit. Then, go into the Shading workspace tab.

Here is an example node setup that uses the same image for both the color and bump texture. 

Step 7:

For at least one of your materials, uses a non-image texture. Some examples are Voronoi, Musgrave, Checker, or Brick.

Step 8:

When you are happy with the result, follow these steps:

1. 1. Add lights to your scene
   2. Position your camera carefully
   3. Press NUM0 to enter Camera view to double-check your camera view
   4. Press F12 to render the scene to an image
   5. Save the image by pressing ALT+S to save the render
      You can also use the menu: Image-->Save

Grading