Learning Blender: A Hands-On Guide to Creating 3D Animated Character= s, Second Edition

10. Materials and Shaders

You now have textures that define the color of the surfaces, but something’s still missing: materials! Materials are sets of components and values that determine how the light is diffused, absorbed, reflected, or transmitted by a surface when you launch a render. A material can be reflective, may be transparent, and can even emit light. You have to set up these properties for materials. They’re also called shaders because a shader (internally, through programming) tells the software how to draw an object on your screen. (There are even shading languages to program how these shaders work.) Hence, the process of adding materials is called shading. First, you learn about the main workflow and how to use materials. The rest ...