Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Textures and materials are very crucial. Without them, for example, what we have created so far is a grey snowman, with a grey nose, grey hands and a grey hat. Not so realistic. So, materials and textures is a way to add realism to the look of our models with images, plain colors, etc.
You must have a material to apply a texture on it (by default blender adds a material to your objects in order to see their surfaces).
So, for this month we will introduce materials – leaving textures for next month, as it is impossible to fit them both in an article.
But, before anything else, let’s upgrade blender. A new release (2.66a) is available at http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/ with a bunch of new features and over 250 bugfixes.
Let’s load the snowman blend file that we created last month. It has to look something like this in object mode (shown below).
Notice the small icons at the right of your 3D view window. The fourth icon from the right (highlighted) is the Materials tab.
Select the hat and press the New button: Name your material “Hat”. Your material tab has to look something like the one shown right.
As you can see, there are a lot of things that we can tweak, but we will introduce the very basics to create a kind of realistic environment (maybe, in a later stage of this article-series, we can focus on materials and textures explaining all in detail, but, for now, feel free to experiment with those).
Blender gives us a preview window where we can inspect the color of our material. Also, on the right, we can change the basic object that we are previewing (this doesn't affect our object at all, but helps us to understand how the color looks – for example on spheres or boxes).
Under Diffuse, there is a white strip. Press with your LMB (Left Mouse Button) on it to change the color. Select the color of your choice from the color wheel, or enter manually the values of Red, Green and Blue below the wheel, or you can use the color picker – well known from other graphic applications.
You can use the HSV button to choose your color by Hue Saturation and Value, or you can use the Hexadecimal numbers that are commonly used on web pages to specify colors. I personally use only the RGB values. The values can vary from 0 to 1 indicating the percentage of the color (0.2 = 20% for example).
On the right of the wheel there is a slider controlling the intensity of the color. If you slide it all the way down we have absolute black. Also notice that values of Red, Green and Blue are all changed to 0.
Under Specular, there is also a white strip. From there we choose the color of the reflection on shining objects. For example choose for diffuse: color Red = 0.015, Green = 0, Blue = 0.24, and for specular: Red = 0.915, Green = 1, Blue = 0. Also on the preview window, change the basic object to monkey.
Looks like the image below?
NOTE: The monkey of blender is actually a chimpanzee, called Suzanne. This 3d mode, created by Willem-Paul van Overbruggen, was introduced to the blender community as a test model for materials, textures, lights, etc. The Suzanne awards (something like the Oscars awards) are held annually for blender artists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzanne_Award
Now, let’s go back to our snowman. Reload the snowman.blend file, select the plane that we use as ground and LMB on the material tab.
Press New to create a new material and rename it from “Material” to “Ground”.
Under Diffuse, press LMB on the white strip and put the values 0.5 for Red and Blue and 0.8 for Green. On the 3d view window, you can see that the color of the ground changes to a green looking surface.
Select one button of the snowman, and press the new Button on the material tab. Name it “Button”, and, under Diffuse, color it red (by now you must know the way to do that, but, in case you don't, just put R = 1, G and B to 0):
Now, with your RMB, select another button of the snowman. Under the material tab, you can see the New button that we used earlier to create a new material. Left of this there is an icon similar to the “materials” one in blender.
Press it and select Button from the list:
The materials that we create are stored for later use in the blend file, and many different objects can share the same material.
Keeping that in mind, create materials for the hands, the hat, the nose, and the pipe. Also assign the Button material to the other buttons, or create a new material for each button if you like.
For the hat I created a material with a Halo behavior – just to make a Saint snowman with two Halos!!!! Very Saint!
You can experiment with the other two kinds of materials behavior: Wire and Volume.
For this month, I recommend that you download and play a game created in blender with the blender game engine. Yo frankie! http://www.yofrankie.org/
Also you can check out blenderguru.com. A site dedicated to blender, with a lot of tutorials for beginner and advanced users, created and hosted by Andrew Price, a very talented blender artist. Enjoy. http://www.blenderguru.com