The Shader Editor
The shading system supports different styles: realistic, cartoon, or technical drawings, to mention a few. Rather than providing a single interface with defined widgets, the functionalities of a renderer are scattered through interconnecting units called nodes.
Much like a function, a node performs a specific operation on one or more inputs and makes the results available through one or more outputs. Nodes are visual representations of functions, allowing non-programmers to combine logic blocks to get custom results.
Nodes are not unique to shading – they are used for Compositing and for generating meshes in the Geometry Nodes modifier.
By default, a Blender material presents a Material Output node in the Shader Editor area, with a Principled BSDF node as its Surface input. Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Function (BSFD) is a mathematical model of how a surface receives and reflects light rays. It is a form of Physically-Based Rendering (PBR...