[ENDED] BC1-1808 – August 2018 Class Homepage – Getting Started with 3D Modeling & Blender 2.8
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@yukinoh1989 Glad to hear it! To add a material to an object simply head over to the material panel on the right and you’ll be able to edit it there. If the object doesn’t have a material already (it appears only the default cube starts with one) there’ll be a big “New” button, so hit that.
Now there is something called the Node Editor (renamed the Shader Editor in 2.8) but that’s quite advanced and for what we’re doing here unnecessary so lets look at what’s in front of us.
The only options we need to concern ourselves with now are under the Surface tab: Base Colour, Metallic and Roughness. Base Colour is fairly self explanatory, and determines the colour of the mesh. Metallic determines if the material is metal or not, you’re going to want to set this to either 1 for metal, or 0 for non-metal, inbetweens typically look rather funky and unrealistic.
Here’s a cube with Metallic at 1:
And here’s a cube with Metallic at 0:
As you can see the difference is rather large. Obviously it’d be easier to showcase if I had a more complex/realistic mesh but this shall do. The final option you need to concern yourself with is Roughness, this determines how “shiny” the material is (both of these renders were at a roughness of 0.5). Unlike Metallic feel free to fiddle about with this.
Here’s a cube with Metallic at 1 and Roughness at 1:
And here’s a cube with Metallic at 1 and Roughness at 0 (which makes it completely reflective, so I added more geometry to the cube and made it smoother to make it reflect better):
Hope this clears a bunch of things up!
@yukinoh1989 With the Specular setting it’s best to leave it alone if you want realistic-looking materials. It essentially makes the reflections brighter or duller, but the roughness setting handles this much better so unless you’re going for something unrealistic and odd then just leave it at default.
I made the background with what’s know as an HDRI (which stands for High Dynamic Range Imaging), which is basically a 360 degrees picture that’s quite commonly used in renders, because not only do they look nice and give something to reflect, but more importantly they give off light values depending on the image (for example if you had an HDRI that had two bright, red bulbs then the brightness in the image would affect you scene) to give realistic lighting. They’re admittedly a pretty advanced option so I wouldn’t worry about them for now but I’ll go over the basics of getting one set up.
First, download an HDRI. HDRI Haven is a great place for free, high quality HDRIs, it’s where I get all of mine from.
Once you’ve picked one you like, go to the World tab and hit “Use Nodes”.
After that, next to the Colour option is a dot, click that and you’ll get a drop-down, then select “Environment Texture”.
Finally click the “Open” button and select your HDRI (do note though that they can be a bit memory intensive and can really increase your render times but they’re almost always worth it):
Boom, you now have an HDRI in your scene (though keep in mind it doesn’t appear in the default “Solid” mode)!
just a little screenshot to compliment what @arev was saying about the outliner and how you can toggle their visibility
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