10. Materials and Shaders

You already have textures that define the color of your model’s surfaces, but something is still missing: materials. In Blender, materials determine how a surface is going to receive and use lights when you launch a render. It can be reflective or transparent, or it can even emit light. These are examples of properties that you have to set up using materials. They’re also called shaders because a shader is what tells the software (internally, through programming) how to draw an object on your screen (there are even shading languages to program how these shaders work). Hence, shading is the process of adding materials. In this chapter, you’ll learn about the main workflow for shading and how to use materials. After you understand the basics, the chapter will describe how to use materials in both render engines, Blender Render and Cycles, as they’re quite different.