Blender For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Playing with Materials

By default, all newly added objects in Blender share a gray, plasticlike material. The easiest way to change the look of an object is to adjust its material properties. The controls are in the Material section of the Properties editor. Twelve panels are visible in Material Properties:

• Context: Like other sections of the Properties editor, the Material Properties starts with a context panel. This panel provides a list of material datablocks associated with your selected object and the means to define some basic attributes of those materials.
• Preview: The Preview panel displays an image of the material on a variety of preset objects: a plane, a sphere, a cube, Suzanne's head, hair strands, and a sphere on a sky background.
• Diffuse: The diffuse color is the main color of the object, or the primary hue that the material reflects to the camera. The controls in this panel allow you to set that color, as well as how it reflects light.
• Specular: One cool thing about working in computer graphics is that you have a say over things that you don't normally control in the real world. The specular color, or spec, is the color of highlights on your object. From the Specular panel you can adjust the specular color object, its intensity, and how it reflects light.
• Shading: The Shading panel gives you a set of broad controls to dictate how your object reflects light, regardless of the settings chosen in the Diffuse and Specular panels.
• Transparency: As advertised, this panel ...