Learning Blender: A Hands-On Guide to Creating 3D Animated Characters

Shading Jim in Cycles

Now that you have a basic understanding of how Cycles materials work, let’s jump right in and use shaders to make Jim look great!

Basic Shading

Cycles materials are more complex to render than Blender Render materials, so you may want to add one or two lights to be able to see your scene when you switch from time to time to the rendered mode display in the 3D view to preview how everything is looking.

1. Select Jim’s face and add a new material called Jim_mat. Add a Mix Shader to it and, for the first slot, pick a Diffuse BSDF shader. In its color field, load Jim’s textures as an image and make sure the Vector is set to Texture Coordinate | UV. The image may look a little dark, but don’t worry; it’s because the other half ...