In this book, we will be using Blender 3.4.1. However, the same principles and methods will most likely be applicable in earlier versions of Blender.

The latest version of Blender can be downloaded at the following link:

https://www.blender.org/download/

Blender’s official website states the following minimum hardware requirements:

• 64-bit quadcore CPU with SSE2 support
• 8 GB RAM
• Full HD display
• Mouse, trackpad, or pen and tablet
• Graphics card with 4 GB RAM and OpenGL 4.3 support
• Less than 10-year-old system and OS

These specifications are defined by the official Blender website as the minimal requirements, but higher specifications will obviously lead to better performance.

The prepared resources can be found in the Chapter01 folder within the book’s downloadable resources folder, available here: https://packt.link/mA1OU.

Blender has multiple workspaces. A workspace is simply a way of arranging the windows and tools in Blender to make them more convenient for a particular job. For example, the Modeling workspace makes available the most important modeling tools and windows. The Shading workspace will do the same but for shading and material creation. We will work in the Shading workspace because it provides us with all the tools we need for now.

By default, Blender displays four separate windows in the workspace, as indicated in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 – Default Blender workspace

To work with materials, we will need some different windows. To save time, we can avoid having to open these windows manually by clicking on the Shading button on the bar at the top of the screen, as shown in Figure 1.2.

The Shading workspace has some new useful windows for texturing and creating materials. We now have a Shader Editor window, which we...

We will now learn to create new materials and control some of their basic properties. We will also learn to apply multiple materials to a single object, which will be useful for texturing models more complex than the default cube.

In the next few steps, we will create a new material and change some of the properties of that material:

1. Navigate to the Material Properties tab on the right side of the screen and click the New button to create a new material.

Figure 1.3 – Default Material in the Material Properties men.

2. In the Surface menu below the default material, find the Base Color box. Clicking on this box will open the color wheel, where you can choose any color for the material.

   Let’s create a military green color to practice some of the color controls. We will click on the green/yellow area in the outermost part of the color wheel, as shown in Figure 1.4 (bottom).

Figure...

We will now learn how to add multiple materials to a single object. In the next few steps, we will split our cube in half and create a separate material for each half:

1. In Edit Mode, add a loop cut with Ctrl + R to cut the cube into two parts.

Figure 1.7 – Adding a loop cut to a cube

2. Click on the plus button in the Material Properties tab to add a new material slot.

   This will not create a new material; it will only create a new slot. We can use this slot to either create a new material or load an existing material from another object. This time, we need a new material.

Figure 1.8 – Adding a new material slot

3. Click on the New button to create a new material. The new material will be named Material.002 by default.

Figure 1.9 – Creating a new material

4. Switch to Face Select mode by pressing 3, and select one...

In this section, we will learn about new material properties such as Roughness, Specular, Metallic, and more. This information will help us improve our understanding of how materials work in Blender, which we can then put to good use to create high-quality materials and textures.

Specular

The Specular property is used to determine how much light is reflected by a surface. If you rotate the cube in the 3D viewport, you will notice that the object has a shiny surface, as is visible in Figure 1.13. This is because the object is specular.

Figure 1.13 – Specular surface

We can control the specular level using the Specular slider in the Material Properties tab, as shown in Figure 1.14.

Figure 1.14 – The Specular slider

When we reduce the specular level on one of the materials to 0.000, light will no longer be reflected by the surface and it will become much darker, as shown in Figure...

In this chapter, we went over some of the basic and common material properties. We learned about the base color, specular, roughness, metallic, and emission properties and we gained an understanding of the different factors that need to be considered to create high-quality materials.

In Chapter 2, Understanding Material Nodes, we will introduce material nodes and learn to use their powers to gain greater control over material properties, which will allow us to create much more sophisticated and realistic materials and textures.