Blender Render Materials

As you learned in the first chapters, the Blender Render render engine is not a realistic renderer. Even though you can achieve realistic results, you’ll have to work very hard to simulate how real-world lighting looks. But it renders a lot faster than Cycles, making it a cool alternative, if you don’t need a lot of realism, for things like motion graphics.

Materials in Blender Render have a lot of parameters. Basically, every material has the same parameters, and by adjusting them carefully you can simulate the properties of real-world materials.

Emission is not actually supported, as Blender Render doesn’t use bouncing light or mesh lights. Objects will be bright if they have an emissive material, but they won’t cast light over the scene.

While you can create very complex materials using nodes, in Blender Render you usually work in the Properties Editor, on the Material and Texture tabs.