Shading Jim in Blender Render

So now that you know how materials work in Blender Render, let’s start shading Jim!

1. In the 3D View Properties Region (N), find the Shading panel and select the GLSL shading method (this is the one Blender uses to display materials in the 3D View).

2. On the 3D View header, set the Display mode to Texture, so Blender shows textures and materials in the 3D preview.

3. If you have no lights in your scene, add one (Shift + A). You probably want to add a Sun light; it’s directional and illuminates the whole scene, while an Omni light would only illuminate a single spot and you’d need to move it all the time to see what’s going on.

Even though you set everything up correctly, keep in mind that in the 3D View, you won’t see all of the properties of a material—its reflections, transparencies, shadows, refractions, and so forth. These properties will only work correctly in the final render, and even though you can preview things such as transparencies and shadows (only with Sun and Spotlight lights), these effects won’t have good quality. In the 3D View, you’ll get a basic preview of what the material will look like. That’s why when you work on a complex material, you should perform test renders now and then to have a better idea of how the material behaves.

1. Select Jim’s face.

2. Go to the Material tab in the Properties Editor and create a new material. Name it Jim_mat (material for Jim).

3. Jump to the Texture tab in the Properties Editor. Create a new texture and instead of Clouds, set the Texture type to Image or Movie.

4. Inside the Texture properties, search the Image panel and load the texture you’ve created for Jim. At this point, you should be seeing the texture weirdly applied over Jim’s face. Obviously, the UVs are not at work just yet!

5. To set the texture to be projected using the UVs, scroll down to the Mapping panel on the Texture tab and set the Coordinates to UV. Now you should see the texture of Jim’s face properly projected.

6. Select all of the objects that will use the material that includes the textures you’ve made, such as the jacket, cap, boots, gloves, and pants. Finally, select the face so it becomes the active selection. Press Ctrl + L and select Materials from the list. This will make all those objects use the same material as the face.

7. Select the hair objects and the eyebrows. Add a new material to them and call it Hair_mat. In the Diffuse panel, use the blue color that was used in the original designs for Jim.

8. For the rest of Jim’s objects that still don’t have materials (like the little details in the arms), add materials to them as necessary and set their colors. Later, you’ll refine those materials. Leave the eyes alone for now. In Figure 10.3, you can see something similar to what you should have after following these steps.

Figure 10.3 Jim, after the addition of a few basic materials

Figure 10.4 Materials for the eyes, with the cornea separated so you can see what’s going on inside the eyeball

Here are the steps you need to follow to add these materials:

1. Select the eyeball. Apply a material to it and call it Eyeball_mat.

2. In Edit Mode (Tab), add a new material slot to the list and create a new material in it. Call that material Cornea_mat. Select the cornea (you can select it by placing the cursor over it and pressing L). Make sure you have the Cornea_mat selected in the material list and, with the cornea selected in the model, click the Assign button: this will assign that material from the list to the selected faces. With the cornea selected, you can press H to hide it and you’ll be able to work on the faces inside it (the pupil and the iris).

3. Using Figure 10.4, as a reference, repeat the process by creating two new materials called Iris_mat and Pupil_mat, and assign them to the iris and pupil faces the same way that you did for the cornea. Pupil_mat should be black and Iris_mat should use the same blue color that you used for the hair. Now you can press Alt + H to unhide the cornea.

4. Unfortunately, you have to repeat the process for the other eye, or delete it and duplicate the one you just worked on by mirroring it again.

For now, the materials are very basic, but in the next section you’ll learn how to tweak them to make them look better and add more advanced properties to them.

Let’s start with the hair:

1. Select any object with the hair material on it (eyebrows or the hair itself) and jump to the material properties.

2. Reduce the Specular Intensity to 0.3 to make the material less shiny.

3. Set the Specular Color to the same color as the blue you used for the Diffuse Color and give the Specular Hardness a value of around 100, to make the shine a little sharper.

Now let’s arrange the eyes’ materials to make them more realistic. Usually, you could use textures for the iris and pupil, but in this case, let’s keep it simple, so you’ll only be playing with a few material values:

1. Select the eyeball to access the four materials that the eyes own.

2. The first stop will be the cornea, as you need to have it transparent in order to see the iris and the pupil. On the Materials tab, go to the Transparency panel and select Raytrace, set the Alpha to 0 (this will make the material completely transparent), set Specular to 1 (this will make the shine visible even though the surface of the cornea is transparent), and set IOR to 1.5. This will refract light inside the cornea, distorting the pupil and the iris in an interesting and realistic way, so they don’t look like they’re inside a hole.

3. To make the shine in the cornea sharper, go to the Specular panel again and set the Specular mode to Toon. This will give a cartoon effect to the shine, making it very sharp. Set the Intensity to 0.3, the Size to 0.07 (the very small size will prevent the shine from covering the whole cornea) and set Smooth to 0 (this will make the shine spot completely sharp).

4. Now we’ll work on the pupil. To make the pupil always absolutely black, select the Pupil_mat from the materials list. In the Shading panel, enable Shadeless so lights and shadows won’t affect the pupil and black will always be its base color.

5. For the Iris_mat, you might want something similar, but you want to capture little shadows and some shine in the iris. Set the Specular Intensity to 0.2 so the shine is more subtle. Turn the Specular Hardness up to 100 to make the shine sharper. In the Shading panel, set the Emit value to 0.05.

6. The material for the eyeball is quite simple, so just give it some additional hardness to make the shine more defined.

Using Jim’s diffuse texture as a base, I’ve turned it to black and white to make a specularity texture and added some layers on top of it to darken and brighten some areas to create a specular hardness texture. You can see the textures in Figure 10.5.

Figure 10.5 The diffuse (left), specularity (center), and specular hardness (right) textures for Jim

Use the following steps to add textures to Jim’s material:

1. Select Jim’s material (the one to which you added the main color texture). On the Texture tab, select a new slot from the list, name it Specular, and switch its type to Image or Movie.

2. In the Image panel, load the texture for the specularity. Make sure that you set the coordinates to UV in the Mapping panel.

3. Look for the Influence panel on the Texture tab. Turn Color off so Jim doesn’t look black and white—and weird. Turn on Specular Color and leave its value at 1. Now, Jim should look a lot better and if you rotate the camera around him, you’ll see how the darker parts of the texture don’t shine at all, giving it a more natural look.

4. Pick a new slot from the textures list, call it Hardness, and load the Hardness texture. This one usually needs to be really dark to work properly and the darker it is, the softer the shine will be; however, you don’t want some areas to be that soft, so you’ll leave them with light colors in that texture.

5. Set the Coordinates to UV again. In the Influence panel, disable Color and enable Specular Color and Hardness. As this texture is “on top” of the Specular one, the Specular Color setting will override the effect of the Specular texture, but if you decrease the influence of the Specular Color, the Specular channel will gain some effect underneath.