Doc:Tutorials/Materials/BSoD/Shading

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[edit] An approach to Materials (Shading)

Since a surface is lit by lights that will give diffuse and specular lighting it not surprising that 3D applications often refer to these types of property in their material settings. Blender is no exception so let’s setup the diffuse properties for our desk surface.

[edit] Adding a New Material

Before we can do so it necessary to create a new material for the plane surface. So ensure that the plane is selected:

RMB will select the object under the pointer. You will know it is selected because a pink outline will highlight the object.

The button Panel should already be displaying the materials button as shown to the right.

Under the Links and Pipeline tab in the materials button is the ADD NEW button. Select this so that a new material will be created for our desktop object

As you can see Blender creates a default grey material for our object. It’s from this default that we will make modifications to turn the material into more of a wooden desktop like surface. Don’t worry about all those settings displayed. At this stage only a few of them are necessary to produce our wood desktop.

[edit] Diffuse shading (Material general color)

One of the easiest things to do is to setup the general colour of the material.

Just below the preview tab you should see a Material tab with settings for the color.

LMB click the swatch of the COL button to bring up a color picker.

Here you can drag across the color panels to select any color you like. Try it.
LMB a color then confirm it by pressing the ENTER KEY.

The material will now have a diffuse color based on your choice. You are also able to manipulate the R G B sliders directly in the material tab or to enter values to accurately obtain the color you require.

That is what I want you to do now LMB on the R value so that it changes color for direct numerical input.

Enter 1.0 for R(ed) and press TAB to move down to the G(reen) entry.
Enter 0.837 and press TAB to move down to B(lue) entry.
Enter 0.438.

I chose that color after very careful observation of the desk in front of me. If we were to render now this is what we would see.

F12 to render

[edit] SAVE YOUR WORK REGULARLY

When you are working on any creative process involving computers it’s a good idea to regularly save your work. It’s also a good policy to make incremental saves of your work so that if you want to return to a previous save you can do so. Fortunately Blender has a great incremental save feature.

From the File menu select Save As
On the Numeric Keypad press +

The filename will be appended by a number or incremented if it already has one at the end of its filename. Since the initial blend file you downloaded was called desktop-01.blend it will be updated to desktop-02.blend.