Materials

Answers in this category:

1. How do I add materials?
2. How do I add a material?
3. How do I add a Texture?
4. How do I make an object transparent?
5. How can I smooth an object?
6. How can I smooth an objects lighting?
7. How do sticky textures work?
8. What does 'texface' do?
9. How can I smooth an object?
10. How do bump maps work?
11. Which procedural textures does Blender have?
12. How can you render Escher-style images?
13. Which procedural textures does Blender have?
14. How can you give a glass sphere the properties of a magnifing glass????

1 - How do I add materials?

Contributed by Zycho.

To add a material to an object, select the object with the right mouse button. Now press F5 to go to the MaterialButtons. Click and hold the button in the header that looks like a - (minus), and select 'Add New'.

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2 - How do I add a material?

Contributed by Matt Murray.

Adding materials is very simple. First select the object you want to add a material to. Then on the middle row of buttons you'll see a "Red Sphere". Click this. Next, You'll see a Minus(-) button. Click that and select "ADD NEW". Thats it!

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3 - How do I add a Texture?

Contributed by Matt Murray.

Adding a Texture is very simple. After you add a Material, Click the Leopard skin looking button next to the Red Sphere button(for the materials). Now just Click the Minus(-) button and Select "ADD NEW". There are many different types of textures!
That's it!

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4 - How do I make an object transparent?

Contributed by ScrewLoose.

To make an object transparent:

1. Goto the material properties of the object
2. Click the ZTransp button
3. Slide the Alpha slider to the left, the farther you move it the more transparent it will get

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5 - How can I smooth an object?

Contributed by Joel.

With the mesh selected, go to the 'Edit' buttons screen, and turn on 'smooth'. That should do what you want to do, e.g: make spheres look like spheres rather than a set of small squares...

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6 - How can I smooth an objects lighting?

Contributed by TankCommander.

You simply hit the "setsmooth" button in the edit buttons (F9) while you have the object selected.

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7 - How do sticky textures work?

Contributed by Matt Hilliard.

The general principle behind a sticky texture is it is fastened to an object's material from the point view of a camera. Common uses are details such as facial features, decals and logos.
A common way of applying sticky textures is to render the desired object, with an additional camera prior to having the sticky texture. By using it's silouhette and other features to establish how the sticky texture will be applied from the camera in question, and using an image editor such as photoshop or gimp, one can create an image to be textured on the object as it will appear in that particular camera.
The act of applying a sticky texture is as follows:
1. Position a camera so that it faces the object you with to apply the sticky to, and make that camera active ( Ctrl + Keypad0 )
2. Load the image to be made sticky into a texture. And assign that texture to the object's material (add a material if the object doesn't have one).
3. Apply a sticky mapping to the texture by pressing the Green button labelled Stick in the Materials window (F5).
4. Make the texture stick. Under Edit window (F9) look for a Brown button next to the word Sticky. You Make any texture on the current object of mapping Stick a sticky texture by pressing this button when it says Make. You Delete those same textures' stickyness if you press it when it says Delete.
Note that once there is a sticky texture or textures on an object, additional sticky textures will be made sticky from the original camera position. If you decide to move it slighly, you must delete the old one before making a new one.
Note also that the sticky is applied to the back side of the object and any layers in between the two, not just the surface visible to the camera.

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8 - What does 'texface' do?

Contributed by Matt Hilliard.

The texface button under Materials replaces the material colour on every mesh face with a UV-mapped face for the renderer. The renderer is unable to detect UV-mapping without this button, although the realtime/game engine can. Once you have a UV-mapped mesh and with for it to appear in the rendering engine, simply press the TexFace button on the material assigned to the mesh.

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9 - How can I smooth an object?

Contributed by Edna.

Select an object or the vertices that you wish to smooth. Hit "set smooth" in edit buttons.

To get true smoothing depress the "autosmooth" button before pressing "set smooth". This gives you control over the minimum angle between faces before they are smoothed. This type of smoothing is only effective when rendering.

Look up the 1.8 appendix on the main Blender site.

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10 - How do bump maps work?

Contributed by Edna.

The texture is read in terms of intensity (ie greyscale) and that intensity is used to simulate height during rendering. Pressing the "nor" button (material buttons, on the right hand side of the screen) makes the material act in this way. The nor slider determines how much height is attributed to the bumps.

To make a coloured texture read as an intensity map, hit the "No RGB" button (in material buttons).

Note: This is a "fake" effect, in that the bump effect is simulated using shadows and distortion. The bumps are not visible if you look at a flat, bump mapped, surface from the side.

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11 - Which procedural textures does Blender have?

Contributed by Hideki Saito.

Blender has following procedural textures and its variations:
Clouds, Wood, Marble, Magic, Blend, Stucci and Noise.

There are some variations in some textures, such as wood, which has four variations: bands, rings, bandnoise, and ringnoise.

Also, this functionality can be expanded using third-party plugins.

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12 - How can you render Escher-style images?

Contributed by B@rt.

(from the discussion server by Macke):

There is a feature in blender to produce these escher type renders.

Check in the materials window, there is a button called Zinvert, press it and render. Voila!

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13 - Which procedural textures does Blender have?

Contributed by mackesch.

Assign a material to an object and go to the textures button (F6) and create a new texture.
You will see a row of grey buttons.
Here you'll find every procedural textures blender supports. But you can load texture plugins into blender.

A list of them you can find at:

https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~mein/blender/plugins/texture.cgi

Mackesch.

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14 - How can you give a glass sphere the properties of a magnifing glass????

Contributed by B@rt.

Here's a tutorial that explains how to simulate refraction by using Blender's environment maps:

https://www.blender.nl/showitem.php?id=99

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