Learning Blender, 3rd Edition

10

Materials and Shaders

You now have textures that define the color and properties 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 on your 3D model. A material can be reflective, may be transparent, and can even emit light. You have to set up these properties for materials so they look how you want them to look. Materials are made up by 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 ...