Doc:Tutorials/Materials/BSoD/part1d

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[edit] Specular Shading (Shininess of a material)

Any surface will have a certain level of shininess. This could be as a result of its own properties like glass, or as a result of reacting with something. A dry rock surface as opposed to a wet one. This is often referred to as specular shading.

Blender implements both diffuse and specular shader models under the Shaders tab of the Shading (F5) button.

The Lambert model is one of several available for Diffuse shading and the CookTorr is one of a series of Specular models. Later you will learn about the others but for now we are going to stick with the defaults. In fact the default specular model settings of Spec 0.50 and Hard of 50 are fine for our desk surface.

[edit] Variation across the material surface

I can’t think of any surface that has a totally uniform color, shininess, or flatness. In fact, variation across a material surface is the single most important thing that will transform a dull and obviously 3D generated looking material into an authentic surface representation, or at least a more interesting one.

In order to add any variation to these properties it’s necessary to add textures to our material.

[edit] Textures

Blender offers the ability to apply up to 10 texture layers within a standard Blender material. It is possible by using material nodes to have an almost limitless number of textures applied to a Node material. That is, however, beyond the scope of this training section. It is important to realize that in order to use nodes you should at least master the techniques of standard Blender materials and texture creation, which is the purpose of this BSoD bootcamp training text.

Observation of the desk surface revealed that apart from the wood grain there were some subtle and random variations in color across the surface. We therefore need a similar random texture to give us color variation to our shading model.

[edit] Textures in Blender

Textures in Blender offer a huge range of possibilities to help modify your material. For this reason it can appear a little daunting. However, I will be covering the details of textures in later sections, so for now just follow along with the settings suggested.

Switch the buttons view window to Textures F6 or LMB the textures button.

LMB on the Add New button.

A new texture is created in the first slot with a default name. Currently there is no texture type assigned so the preview is blank.

Click the Texture Type button, where it says None, to display a list of available textures and from the list select Clouds.

The Preview tab gives an indication of what the texture looks like. This, as its name suggests, is like cloud.

Change the Noise Size to 0.158 and the Noise Depth to 3.
Switch back to Materials Button F5 or LMB the materials icon.

As soon as a material has a texture attached a lot of new options appear. We will be dealing with most of these later but for now we only need to worry about three things:-