Juicy Blender Tute 104 - Basic Materials

In this tutorial we will be continuing on from the Lighting Tute.
We will be giving the hammer a nice woodgrain handle and
a metal head for this exercise as well as giving the floor
a nice material.

Let the fun begin...

Select the plane (floor) and press F5 to access the materials section.
By default all blender objects are Grey in colour, but we
want to give the floor a nice texture so...

Press and hold down the square button in the header ..

A little menu appears, select new from the list.
This brings up a default material and assigns it to the plane.

If you render it will still be grey because that is
the default colour. What you need to do is mix up some colours.
Lets make it a nice Green colour eh!

Adjust to roughly these setting..

Then press the little car button on the header and it will
automatically give the material a good name.

Render now and you should have a grey hammer and
a green floor. How nice :)

The floor should be a little bit bumpy I feel.
Floors can be at times, so..

Press F6 to access the textures area
(making sure the plane is still highlighted)
then press the square button on the header

and select add NEW .
Click on the stucci button

and then adjust the size down a bit to roughly these values..

F12 To give a render and it should look something like this..

Press F5 to access the material area again
(making sure the plane is still highlited).

What we want to do is add some bump to the ground,
it looks nice how it is but some depth would be good.
Click the NOR button on the right.

Then render again.

Nice bumpy shiny floor. Beautiful.

Stucci and Noise are the only textures that can be used
as a bump map (at time of writing).
Feel free to explore the other types like image and blend.

Next up we need to make this hammers' colour right. Its too grey.
Ok select the hammer and press TAB to enter editmode.

Right click on the handle to select a vertex then press
Lkey to select the rest of the handle leaving the head unselected.

Press F9 to access the Editbuttons and then press New in the material section.

Press it again to get another material assigned to the hammer.
It should now look like this.

Ok now scroll the button that says 2 Mat:2 and adjust it to 2 Mat:1
This is material slot 1.

With the handle only still selected of the hammer, press assign.
Now select a vertex of the Head with the right mouse click
and press Lkey to have it selected only.

Scroll the 2 Mat:1 to 2 Mat:2 and press assign .
This will assign material slot 2 to the head.

Leave edit mode with the TAB key now and press F5 to
get back to the materail area.

The materail you see now is material 1 (2 Mat:1) Change the
colour of this to a nice brown for the wooden handle.
Now Press the Square Button on the header ..

and select Add New

This new material will be material 2 (2Mat:2)

Make it a nice grey colour and change these values to make
it look like metal..

To go back and edit the wood, don't access the square
button on the header bar, rather scroll the 2 Mat:2
button to swap between Mat 2 and Mat 1.

What you can then do is when on your brown handle material,
add a texture of some wood say.
To do that select your wood material by sliding the
slider Mat 2:1 until your on the wood and
press F6 to access the textures area.
Select the square button on the header window

and Add New
Then select Wood , then bandnoise .
Go back to the material area with F5 and you'll notice
that the wood now has purple stripes through it.

Use the colour mixers on the right to mix up a
lighter shade of brown than your original one on the left.
These two colours will make up your wood grain.

Give it another render and bam.

Wood grain

As with all these tutes this has only scraped the surface
of materials but has hopefully not been to confusing and
has given you enough to get started in the world of blender.
Enjoy and as usual, any comments or bits that dont work,
just email me.