Blender Master Class

General Tips for Creating Materials

Here are some general principles to keep in mind when creating materials in your projects. Chiefly, they involve paying attention to the real-world equivalents of the materials you are trying to replicate and constructing your material accordingly:

Keep reflection amounts sane.  Make sure that the total amount of light your object is reflecting is sensible. When using the Add node to combine shaders in Cycles, it’s possible to create a material that reflects more light than it would realistically receive in the first place by adding too many shaders together. Similarly, in Blender Internal, keep in mind that the diffuse and specular reflection amounts (plus the light absorbed by the object) should roughly add ...