Creating Man-made Materials in Cycles - Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures - page 108

Chapter 4. Creating Man-made

Materials in Cycles

In this chapter, we will cover:

• Creating a generic plastic material
• Creating a bakelite material
• Creating an expanded polystyrene material
• Creating a clear (glassy) polystyrene material
• Creating a rubber material
• Creating an antique bronze material with procedurals
• Creating a multipurpose metal group node
• Creating a worn metal material with procedurals
• Creating a rusty metal material with procedurals
• Creating a wood material with procedurals

Introduction

For the most part, artificial materials are quite easy to recreate in Cycles. In the previ-
ous chapters we discussed the mechanics of building, for the most part with proced-
ural materials using the Cycles render engine. In the following section we'll go on to
discuss some example materials, in particular those that are typically used; namely
artificial materials, starting with one or two examples of simple materials, progressing
on to more complex ones. We'll also have a look at the decayed material shaders, as
worn or rusty metals.

Just a note: by default, in Cycles it would not actually be necessary to add the nodes
for the texture mapping coordinates in any shader network; this because if not speci-
fied, Cycles use the Generated mapping coordinates for the procedural textures and
any existing UV coordinate layer for the image textures.

I think it's a good habit to add the Texture Coordinate and the Mapping nodes to all
the materials, in order to permit an easy reutilization of the shaders on different ob-
jects with different mapping options, scale, and location.