Building Materials and Shaders

According to Wikipedia, a material is a substance, or a mixture of substances, that constitutes an object. This definition for real-life objects also stands true for the models you create electronically with some extra technical details. Let’s look at the definition of a material in our context.

In Blender, materials are essentially containers that hold a bunch of numbers, colors, and textures, besides other useful stuff, and most importantly the shader itself. A shader is a piece of code that tells the rendering engine, either Blender’s or Godot Engine’s, what to do with a material’s properties.

In essence, a material is like a box full of little items, and it comes with a user manual (the shader) so that the software you work with knows what to do with those little items.

You now know the raw definition of what materials and shaders are, but what are they used for? The barrel you created in the previous chapter had...