Blender For Dummies » Chapter 7

Adding Basic Materials to an Eye

Jason — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 07:10:47 +0000

This is an extension to the Modeling an Eye tutorial in Chapter 5. Here I show you how to use material indices to to rough out some of the basic materials on the eye, including the lens, iris, and pupil. There’s a touch on 3-point lighting here, but that’s more of a topic for another tutorial. As with the other tutorials, I’ve uploaded this one to both YouTube and Vimeo… and there’s a link below to directly download the .mp4 file for your own personal use. Enjoy!

eye_material.blend
eye_material.mp4 (38MB)

Vertex Paint

Jason — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:57:35 +0000

You can use Vertex paint on regular meshes as well as multi-res meshes and have a more fine-grained control over your objects’ colors than with a flat material color.

This .blend file should match Figure 7-18. Because of the use of multi-res, this file is quite large (35MB). Bear that in mind if you choose to download it.

Files:

vertexcolor.blend

Raytraced Reflection

Jason — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:51:34 +0000

This .blend file should match Figure 7-8 in the book. It’s an example of using raytraced reflection with the Ray Mirror section of the Material buttons.

Files:

raytraced_reflection.blend

Linked Suzannes; Different Materials

Jason — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:50:33 +0000

These three Suzanne heads share the same mesh data (try it! Tab into Edit mode on one of them). However, because their materials are linked to the Mesh data rather than the Object data, they can all have different materials. Sweet!

The Oops Schematic highlights this point.

Files:

material-link2.blend

Linking a Material to Object Data vs. Mesh Data

Jason — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:49:37 +0000

This is the file used to create Figure 7-3 in the book. By left-clicking the OB and ME buttons in the Links and Pipeline panel below, you should be able to interactively see what I was trying to explain in that chapter. Currently, Material is linked to the Cube mesh data. If you left-click the OB button and select the Material datablock above it, you’ll see that the Material is tied to both the Cube object data *and* it’s mesh data. Left-click the ME button and the X next to to Material datablock and you’ll eliminate the connection between Material and the mesh data. Cool, huh?

Files:

material-link.blend

Material Indices for Non-Mesh Objects

Jason — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:48:00 +0000

This .blend file should match Figure 7-13, illustrating that material indices also work for objects that aren’t meshes. This is really nice for things like text, in my opinion.

Files:

material-indices.blend

Raytraced Transparency and Glossiness

Jason — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:46:59 +0000

The objects in this scene are using both raytraced transparency as well as raytraced reflection. The difference, though, if you render it out is that the materials are set to have a blurry transparency. This is adjusted with the Gloss values in the Mirror Transp panel. There’s one for both raytraced reflection as well as raytraced transparency.

Just know that this will like give you very long render times. If you have an old computer, you may want to go grab a cup of coffee when you render this.

Files:

glossy.blend

Using Material Indices

Jason — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 19:45:26 +0000

As the example in the book showed, you can create a material index for each of the colors on this beach ball. Once you have all your indices created, you can apply a different material to each one, getting you something that hopefully looks like this.

Try to make something that matches this.

Files:

beachball.blend