From BlenderWiki

Jump to: navigation, search

[edit] The Power Supply

The power supply and leads are an interesting material challenge. In both cases their diffuse color is Black which as you all know is the absence of color. Therefore how do you make a black material look 3D and not just a silhouette?

[edit] Specular highlights

If the diffuse color is black it’s only the specularity of the surface that can potentially show the object shape. You can see this if you set the power supply material to Shadeless and then render.

  • Select the power supply mesh  RMB Image:Template-RMB.png
  • Switch to the Material button. F5
  • from the Material tab select Shadeless


  • F12 to Render.


As you can see the power supply is just a silhouette. So specular highlights are important, with any material, to help describe the shape.

  • Turn off shadeless for this material.

[edit] Make the mesh work for the material

The meshes for both the power supply and leads are very simple. The power supply is a subdivided cube object that has been scaled and edge bevelled to give some nice corners to reflect specular highlights.


In reality no object has totally sharp edges. Therefore these should be avoided in any object we create. Blender has some tools to help create bevelled edges which you can read about here.

http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/PartII/Edge_and_Face_Tools#Bevel

Fortunately the power supply, that I have attempted to model, has bevelled edges as part of its design.

Here is a render of the materials with just the specularity set and no bump maps.


[edit] Specular Color

  • select one of the two leads and from the Material button and examine the Material and Shaders tab.

As you can see the Spec color of the Material has been changed from the default white to a subtle blue. It almost gives the material a rubberised look. The reason for setting this was following close examination of the real material and noticing the small change in color of the specular highlights.

The same could be said for the mirror color but since this material doesn’t use ray mirror there is no point in changing this.

[edit] Small differences in Color Settings

There is always a temptation to make large changes to these colors simply because one can. The color sliders vary from 0 (off) to 1 (full). More often than not minor differences, from the default which is pure white, are all that is required.

[edit] The label on the power supply

Before we leave this desktop exercise, to move onto more dramatic material creation, I wanted to talk to you about the label on the power supply.

If you look at the material button for this mesh you will see that there are 2 extra image textures. These were created by photographing the real label and upping the contrast slightly in a photo program. I also copied the file and split the colors into Red, Green, and Blue. I then used levels within my paint package to adjust the best one to give a simple white copy of the label to act as a mask and specular map. This was so the granulated surface of the case did not appear on the label. I also want the label to have a shiny surface compared to the black power supply.


Examine the material and work out how I achieved that.

[edit] Finished Render result

Image: BSoD-Materials-Textures-table-top-02.jpg

[edit] Exercise

OK we have covered a lot of ground with this opening tutorial. Shortly we will move on to a more complex but spectacular scene as well as learning in greater detail some of the features of Materials and Textures in Blender.

[edit] Easy Exercise:-

To test your understanding of image mapping I want you to try and move the label from where it appears in my renders, which I will call default to the opposite right side.

[edit] Difficult Exercise:-

Rotate and re-scale the label so that it appears in the middle of the power supply. You must be able to read the first sentence of the label.

As a tip look into the Texture tab of the Texture button and look for the Rot9(0) button. You will still have to do some interesting things with the size buttons in the Map Input tab to avoid the image being mirrored. (EVEN BIGGER TIP: It involves negative numbers)

Use the Preview Shift P in a top view window to help you orient.

[edit] Part 2: Blender Materials & Textures in a Big World







Redirects to fix

  • BSoD/Introduction to Materials/exercise 2 → Doc:Tutorials/Materials/BSoD/exercise 2
  • BSoD/Introduction to Materials/part1j → Doc:Tutorials/Materials/BSoD/part1j
Retrieved from "http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Tutorials/Materials/BSoD/part1L"