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Blender Materials Tutorial

Blender Materials Tutorial

This Blender Material Tutorial shows how to add materials to a blender object. We will add materials to a screwdriver 3d model to make it look realistic. This is a Blender Materials Tutorial for beginners. We expect that you are not a total beginner and know how to move around and the basics of working in 3D space. If not – check out our four part article where we explain everything you need to know to begin working in Blender – Blender Basics Tutorial: Creating a 3D House.  

I have made a simple screwdriver object that I am going to apply all materials on as an example. It is just a cylinder extruded and scaled a bunch of times. If you can’t create something like this yourself – check out our Blender Modeling Tutorial. Otherwise you can follow the tutorial on any other object, even the default cube.

blender materials tutorial

Adding Blender Materials to an Object

On our object we obviously need to add two materials – one to the handle and one to the screwing part. So let’s review two possible situations. One – is when your scene is made of different independent objects. And two – when the whole thing is a one object that needs two or more materials.

In the first case everything is quite easy. First of all – select the part that you want to add a material to, then go to the Material Properties in the Properties Editor and click the big +New button.

blender material properties

Easy as that – you have created a material. You can see that it is created if at the top there is something like “Material.001” and below are a lot of different settings, like here:

blender new material

.

Then you just select the other part of the object and do absolutely the same thing. It should add the Material.002. 

blender adding material to seperate object

Now for the other case, when everything is connected. You need to do the exact same thing with selecting the object and creating a New Material. This will create a single material for the whole object. 

Then you need to change to the Edit Mode at the top right of the viewport[Tab] and select all of the geometry of the part that you want to have a separate material.

blender separating materials

With this selected proceed to the Material Properties, on the right side click on the plus button to add material slot. 

blender add material slot

This will add a new slot. You need to again press on the +New button to add a material with this slot selected. Then you can assign this material to the selected geometry by using the Assign button.

blender tutorial adding material

Blender Shaders

As part of this Blender Materials Tutorial let’s talk about the materials themselves. When you select a material, you see all the settings below it. Those are the settings of the current shader. The default shader that is created automatically is the Principled BSDF. But let’s start with looking into other shaders. 

The first option in the Surface settings of a Material is the Surface. Here you can choose amongst all the shaders that are available in Blender. 

blender material shaders

I will not go into each one of them and explain how they work. A good example to try would be the Emission Shader. You need to change to the Material Preview Shading to see the changes to the Material that you make.

blender material preview

Though some shaders can work exclusively in the Cycles rendering engine. And the Material Preview Shading utilizes the real-time renderer – Eevee. So consider changing between the Shadings to test everything out properly.

blender emissive shader eevee

Emissive Shader in Eevee

blender emissive shader cycles

Emissive Shader in Cycles

Few more good examples are the Glass BSDF and Velvet BSDF:

blender velvet shader

I recommend you to try all the available shaders out and to try changing the settings that they have. Just as the training and for the knowledge. But we will turn back to the default Principled BSDF shader.

Blender Principled BSDF Shader

Principled BSDF is the most used shader in the Blender. That is because it is the most flexible one and you can create most of the simple stuff using only it. And, as you may notice – there are a lot of settings available for it. A bunch more than any other shader. 

blender principled bsdf

So let’s look into them. But to not extend this article for too long – we will introduce only the most important, interesting and used ones. This does not mean that other settings are useless. They just can be too advanced for now, or too situational. 

Starting with the Base Color – it is the most obvious one and one of the most important settings. Fairly simply to use: just click on it and select the color, its brightness and saturation. 

blender materials base color

Next is the Subsurface Scattering settings. They are a bit on an advanced side, but I could not miss them out. 

blender materials subsurface scattering

It is the effect when light comes through the object and scatters by interacting with it. Sounds really difficult, but in reality you meet such materials everyday and one example – especially. This example – is your own skin. When you glow a strong light on it – you can see the light coming through your body and exiting from the different angles creating a red glow. That is – Subsurface Scattering.

blender subsurface scattering

Next is Metallic and it is quite obvious how it works – makes objects look like they are made out of metal. Used in the combination with Roughness setting.

blender materials metallic

Roughness – Decides how rough your object is. Absolutely rough objects(1) do not reflect lighting at all and not rough objects (0) – reflect the surrounding perfectly. 

blender materials roughness

By combining the Metallic and Roughness settings you can create a really reflective material.

blender reflective material

Transmission is quite self-explanatory. It is for controlling how much lighting transmits through your object. So if you create a light source on the one side of the transmissive object – you will see the light exiting on the other side.

blender materials transmission

And the last important setting is Emission. It is really similar to the Emission Shader that we already tested. But this one is right in the Principled BSDF, so you can change all the other settings of your object, such as its Roughness and Metallicness in addition to making it emissive.

blender materials emission

Matching Blender Materials to an Object

After we learned the Principled BSDF’s main settings is the time to try and create materials for our object. As I already mentioned – there would be two materials. Let’s start with the handle.

Usually modern screwdrivers are made out of rubber or plastic. But in my case it seems that the screwdriver is not that modern, so I guess the wood material would fit the best. 

For wood material first of all I change the Base Color to be similar to wood. So something brownish, maybe with a tint of red.

blender materials change color

There is no Subsurface Scattering in wood and it is definitely not Metallic. Roughness: wood can be a bit reflective, but on the old screwdriver it would be too worn out, so not that reflective. Emission or Transmission is definitely not needed here. So the result is like this:

blender materials create wood

Changing it to rubber would be really easy – basically just change the color and that is it. Lower Roughness a bit too, as rubber can be a bit reflective. 

blender rubber material

And Plastic would be just like rubber, but a lot less rough(reflective).

blender plastic material

Now for the screwing part. This one is a lot easier and there are not a lot of possibilities. These parts are made of metal, so Metallic goes to 1 right of the bat. Then you lower the Roughness to something that would suit this part. In my case it should not be too reflective, so like 0.4.

blender metal material

And that is basically it. You can experiment with the Roughness and color a bit. Make it look like some different metal. Maybe even golden:

blender brass material

Or, as it is the old screwdriver – you can try to make it look a bit rusty by changing the Base Color.

blender rust material

And basically we are done. We have created two different materials for our object, so it now looks like a screwdriver with a wooden handle and metallic screw.

blender matching materials

Adding Image to Blender Materials

But there is another way of adding simple materials to your objects. That is adding textures – images aligned with the object. You can use any image for this that you found on the internet. Best to use the images that were specifically made for this task though. I will use this image that I found on the textures.com:

blender wood texture

To apply it to the object, go to the Base Color setting and click on the big dot to the left of it. In the appeared window find the Image Texture option under the Texture column.

blender image texture

Click on the appeared Open button and select the image that you want to use from your computer. Results should be seen in the viewport instantly after you do that.

blender wood texture

And depending on the object that you are using – the result can be quite bad. Just like in my case – texture looks really weird, stretched in some places. You can try to fix this by UV Mapping the object properly. 

For an easy solution change to the Edit Mode and select all of the objects geometry. After that go to the UV Settings[U] and try the Smart UV Project option. 

blender uv mapping

This should make it better and would totally work on some objects. Sadly in my case it is not that good either, though better. Seams are too visible:

blender materials uv mapping

If this did not work for you – you can try using other options from the UV settings menu. For example, the Cube Projection worked quite well for me. 

blender cube projection

Sadly, this still will not work for every and each object. Some of them require an individual approach. If you want to learn how to use images as materials properly and work with UV Maps in general – check out our Blender UV Mapping Tutorial. The main advantage of using this approach is that it looks more realistic and you even can control the Metallic, Roughness and other settings of the image texture you applied.

blender materials render

Conclusion Blender Materials Tutorial

In this Blender Materials Tutorial we introduced to you the basics of the Materials. What shaders are there, what is the main shader and what are the most important settings there? Also the method of adding images to your objects as material was shown. 

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