Book Image

Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook

Book Image

Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook

Overview of this book

Blender 2.5 is one of the most usable 3D suites available. Its material and texture functions offer spectacular surface creation possibilities. It can take you hours just to create basic textures and materials in Blender and when you think of creating complex materials and textures you are petrified. Imagine how you will feel when you overcome these obstacles. This book wastes no time on boring theory and bombards you with examples of ready-created materials and textures from the start, with clear instructions on how they were created, and what you can learn from them for making your own. It covers all core Blender functions you will ever need to easily create perfect simulation of objects from the simplest to the most complex ones. The book begins with recipes that show you how to create natural surface materials, including a variety of pebbles, rocks, wood, and water, as well as man-made metals, complete with rust. By utilizing some of the easiest-to-use animation tools available, you will be able to produce accurate movement in mesh objects. Familiarize yourself with a plethora of tools that will help you to effectively organize your textures and materials. You will learn how to emulate the reflective properties of natural materials and how to simulate materials such as rusted iron, which is difficult to make believable. Transparency and reflection are both tricky natural surface properties to simulate but these recipes will make it easy. Explore ways to speed up animations by using special painting techniques to significantly lower render times. By the end of the book, you will be able to simulate some of the most difficult effects to recreate in any 3D suite, such as smoke, fire, and explosions.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Combining materials using nodes


In this recipe, we will combine two materials within a node tree to create the full slate roof effect.

Getting ready

This recipe starts at the end of the last one. If you have not completed that recipe you can download the blendfile from the Packtpub website.

How to do it...

Since two component materials have already been created, we only have to combine them within the material node to create the final result.

  1. With the slate-roof-04.blend open, select the plane object and from the Materials panel, change the material to the slate-roof material created in previous recipes. Do this by clicking the Browse Data ID button to the left of the material name and select slate-roof from the displayed list. This will display the beginning node setup with the slate-roof material attached to an Output node.

  2. In the Node editor, press SHIFT+A to bring up the Add menu and add a new Input/Material node. Choose the slate-stains material from its Browse Data ID.

Now, we have two materials...