Cycles Materials

Cycles is a realistic render engine, meaning that light behaves in a similar way to how it appears in the real world. Materials in Cycles are set up very differently than in Blender Render. While you can access their basic properties in the Properties Editor, to create complex materials you’ll have to go to the Node Editor and mix different shaders to achieve the result you need.

Cycles materials are made of shaders. There are different kinds of shaders that represent different types of surfaces: Diffuse, Glossy, Glass, Emit, and Transparent, for example. Sometimes, using one of them will do, but to create cool and realistic materials, you’ll have to mix several shaders together. Shaders are pretty simple and each of them has only a few properties, but mixing them together can get very complex.

As discussed in the first chapters, you’ll get a more realistic result quite easily in Cycles, but it will usually cost you more render time.