In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:
- An overview of material nodes in Cycles
- An overview of procedural textures in Cycles
- How to set the World material
- Creating a mesh-light material
- Using volume materials
- Using displacement
Cycles' materials work in a totally different way than in Blender Internal.
In Blender Internal, you can build a material by choosing a diffuse and a specular shader from the Material window, by setting several surface options, and then by assigning textures (both procedurals and image maps as well) in the provided slots. All of these steps make one complete material. After this, it's possible to combine two or more of these materials by a network of nodes, thereby obtaining a lot more flexibility in a shader's creation. However, the single materials themselves are the same as those set through the Material window—shaders made for a scan-line-rendering engine—and their...