From the course: Blender 4.0 Essential Training

How to add materials to objects in Blender - Blender Tutorial

From the course: Blender 4.0 Essential Training

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How to add materials to objects in Blender

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- [Instructor] Now that you've had a chance to play with modifiers, let's take a look at how to add some color to our scene. Up here at the top right, you'll see a few different modes available to you. The first is wireframe. This is cool because it shows you a wireframe or where all the vertices and edges meet. Next is a mode that you're going to be in a lot, this is called solid mode, and generally speaking, it doesn't really have any colors to it, although if you click this little down caret, you can go to say, for example, random, object, random, and get some different colors. But these are not the colors that are actually going to render in your final image. Next are two modes that are going to be really important to us. Viewport shading, which shows you the actual color of this object and then the final render view. Let's stick to viewport shading for right now. It looks like a little bit of a beach ball with one big quadrant colored in. And curiously, at the bottom right, you'll see another beach ball that's red, that's called material properties. So let's go ahead and click on that one and add a new material. You can do that just by clicking on new, and you'll be greeted by this thing called a principled BSDF. BSDF stands for bidirectional scattering distribution function, AKA, what happens when light hits your object and bounces back? How does it bounce back? What does it bounce back with? All of these things can be defined by this awesome node called principled BSDF. Most important for us right now is base color, so let's go ahead and Left Click on that and just pick any color that you want. Now remember, I have a array modifier, so any one color I pick for the first one will affect all the others. But these objects, if I go ahead and Left Click on them, I can go ahead and add a new material and give them a unique color. Let's go ahead and Left Click on this one over here. And instead of giving this one a new unique color, I can Left Click this little beach ball and see all my previous ones. Now, if you don't see any of this, for example, if you see something like this, that's because you're not in the material properties part of the properties panel. So look for your red beach ball, if you don't see a red beach ball at all, for example, if you see a red checker, you need to Left Click on any one of these objects to then see the beach ball. Let's go ahead and add some new materials for all the others really quick. All right, there we go. Now we've gone ahead and added new materials to all of our objects. There are some other properties in here that you can go ahead and play with and see what happens. For example, metallic. Drag it all the way to the right, and it gets this more darker, frankly, a little bit more metallic feeling kind of color. You did see it pop for a second there, if that happens on your side, that's just Blender doing some calculations really quick. Roughness makes things really shiny. A roughness of one effectively tells Blender that this thing is very coarse, whereas a roughness of zero is basically a mirror. However, if you drag your metallic down, it's kind of a dull mirror. Roughness and metallic play together really well, so that's why we use these two quite a bit. In fact, this is the foundation of most CGI, including video games, movies, TV, film, et cetera, it is the metallic-roughness workflow. Base color is kind of the albedo or flat color under flat, gray-ish kind of lighting, metallic and roughness define how this object will respond to things. There are also many other hidden items here, which we'll play with a little bit later on in this course, but for now, feel free to play with them, poke around, see what interesting things you can come up with, and when you're ready, we'll move on to the next video where we add some lights.

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