Fly a Fighter Aircraft Through a Storm - Blender 2.5 - page 83

F Influence panel:
Diffuse color: 0.4
Blend: Value
For this texture, we just used an image texture with some strong dots in it to give
the illusion of being reflected from the canopy. The good old trick of using the
Relecion coordinates is very handy for this kind of use. Seing the Blend to Value
makes the texture affect the material only by how bright or dark the color is, and not
by the color hue itself.
10. Now that we are done with creaing the materials, the only thing let to do is
assigning the fighterBody material to the fighterStabliators object. To do
this, select the fighterStabliators object and add a new material slot in the
Material tab of the Properties Editor . Next click on the red icon to the left-hand
side of the name of the material (below the list of the material slots) and select the
material fighterBody . This way we use the same material in the stabilators, which
are a separate object from the body of the aircrat. Now is also a good ime to save
our file.
Objective Complete - Mini Debriefing
We created two simple materials for the fighter aircraft. The first one, fighterBody , was
created by making some good use of ramps for the two texture channels involved and
choosing the right colors, both in the diffuse property of the material and in the color stops
of the ramps, to end up with a very cool military look for the body of the fighter.
The canopy was quite easy to do, by using a bluish base color to convey the idea of coldness
and applying a simple texture image in relecion coordinates to fake relecions on the
surface of it.
Finally, we just shared the fighterBody material with the fighterStabilators object
by assigning it to the correct material slot for the object.
Classified Intel
The two materials that we created have the ambient seing disabled. This seing is used
to apply a general, lat, lighing to the object; when no light reaches a certain part of the
object, it is "lit" only by the ambient color defined in the World tab of the Properties Editor .
In places where the light is afecing the object, the inal look gets a inted look from the
ambient color; the ambient seing of the material controls how much efect this general
lighing has on the material it is set for. In this case, we don't want this behavior for the
material, so we just turn it off.