In order to add materials to your objects, you will need to locate the Materials section of the Properties panel. You might need to widen the Properties panel to see all of the icons. Remember that this panel is context-sensitive and depends on what you have selected. If your camera is selected, you won't see the Material icon. If you have just opened Blender, just leave the default cube selected. Look at the top of this panel for the circle icon, fourth from the right. Hover your mouse over this icon to see the tool tip "Material" appear. Go ahead and click this icon to reveal the Materials section (Figure 1).

At the top of this panel is a "stick pin" icon and a row of "breadcrumb" icons. The stick pin icon is used to keep the current material visible, no matter what object you select. The breadcrumbs show the hierarchy of the material and how it is linked, although as of Alpha 2, it suggests materials are linked to the Object level. For now, skip over the breadcrumb section, but keep it in mind as it will be useful when working with textures.

Also, notice a box with "Material" selected in blue. This is the material slot section and is used for creating multiple materials. We will explore this section in another tutorial.

Look directly below this section to see the same Material icon, along with a field with "Material" in it. This is the name of the current material. You may click in this field to rename it. If you click on the icon to the left of the field, a list of all materials appears (Figure 2). This is a list of all the material datablocks in your scene. Right now, you only have one.

Notice the "+" to the right of the material name. If you click this, Blender will duplicate the current material and add a default suffix of ".001" onto the name. This new material will appear in the list. If you click the "X" button, you will remove the current material from the selected object. However, that material will still be available to choose later on from the material list, until you close the file and re-open it later.

To the right of the Material name section is a drop-down menu that allows you to pick if the material is linked to the object's Data or to the Object itself. By default, materials are linked to the Object Data. If you pick Object from this drop-down menu, you will need to add a material because there are none connected to the Object level yet. Click "New" (or use the material list to choose "Material") and look in the Outliner to see that the material is nested directly beneath the Object level. Undo back to the material being linked only to the Data. Until you are very comfortable with how Blender's hierarchy works, always leave materials linked to Data.

Below the material name, etc. is how your material is rendered. The default option is "Surface" and will be what you'll use most of the time. "Wire" will render your object as a wireframe. "Volume" is helpful when rendering clouds or gases. "Halo" will render the vertices of your objects and is useful with particle rendering.

Moving on down, we come to the Preview section (Figure 3). By default your material is previewed as a sphere. Since our object is a cube, it makes sense to preview as a cube, so click on the cube icon.

Diffuse

Moving on, the next section down is the Diffuse settings. If you click the long swatch, you can change the diffuse material color (Figure 4). The Intensity will control how much of that color is reflected back to the camera during rendering.

The drop-down menu allows you to choose different diffuse shaders. These are the settings for the Lambert shader. If you select a different shader, more options will appear (Figure 5).

Below this menu is the Ramp option. Check this on to create a gradient for the diffuse color (Figure 6).

Disable the Diffuse ramp and notice that the Diffuse section looks very similar to the Specular section. Blender is pretty good about keeping a consistent structure across the program.

Specular

The Specular section is used to describe the material highlight appearance. Like the Diffuse settings, you have options for the color, intensity and ramp. The CookTorr shader is on by default and has Hardness as an option, which controls how hard the edges of the highlight are. If you select a different specular shader, you will receive options specific to that shader (Figure 7).

Shading

In this section, you can make your material do such things as emit light (glow) or control how much ambient light (using the World setting, Ambient Occlusion) hits the material (Figure 8). Translucency is set at zero by default. Shadeless will render the material as a flat color. Tangent Shading will give an anisotropic effect. Cubic Interpolation will just give a smoother diffuse falloff effect.

Transparency

The transparency section will actually control how opaque your material is, as indicated by the Alpha value of 1 (100% opaque). You can choose between either Z-transparency or Raytrace transparency, depending on your need or render time (Figure 9 & 10).

 

Mirror

The Mirror section will control the amount of reflectivity. It's assumed as raytracing, since that's the only way it will render correctly (Figure 11).

Subsurface Scattering

The next section down is Subsurface Scattering. If you click the "Presets" drop-down menu, you will see many presets such as milk, skin, cream, etc.(Figure 12).

Strand

The Strand section can be helpful when rendering hair or other materials with that type of appearance (Figure 13).

Options

This section gives you more control per material of how it renders. If you were to uncheck "Traceable" but you had raytracing on when you render, that material would not show up in reflections, etc. Also, you can use the Light Group section at the bottom to light link your materials and control which lights affect the material. (Figure 14).

 

 

 

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