Creating Organic Materials - Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures - page 235

Creating a beetle-like chitin material

with procedural textures

In this recipe we will create a material similar to a beetle's iridescent chitin, as shown
here:

Getting ready

Start Blender and open the 1301OS_07_start.blend file, where there is an
already set scene with an unwrapped Suzanne primitive object.

How to do it...

Let's start with the creation of the chitin material by assigning a second default ma-
terial to the eyes of the Suzanne mesh (which, although not connected to the face
vertexes, are part of the same object):

1. Click on New in the Node Editor window's header or in the Material win-
dow on the right and rename the new material as chitin_beetle .
2. Press Tab to go in the edit mode and select the eyes' vertexes (put the
mouse pointer on the part and press the L key to select all the connected
vertexes). Click on the + icon in the top-left corner of the Material window
to add a new material. Click on New , rename the material as eyes , and
click on the Assign button. Press Tab to come out of the edit mode.
3. Now, in the Material window, select the chitin_beetle material. Switch the
Diffuse shader with a Mix Shader node. In the first Shader slot select a
new Mix Shader node and in the second one, a Glossy BSDF shader
node. Set the Glossy shader's Roughness value to 0.100 and its Color
value to R 0.800 , G 0.574 , B 0.233 .