Overview of Materials in Cycles - Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures - page 16

10. Save the file as start_03.blend .
How it works...
As is immediately visible in the Rendered viewport, at the moment the Wave Tex-
ture node color output is connected to color input of the Diffuse BSDF shader node,
the spheroid looks as if it's painted in a black and white series of bands; actually, the
black and white bands output of the texture node override the green color of the dif-
fuse component of the shader, while keeping the material's pink glossy component
unaltered (steps 1 to 3).
Exactly the opposite as you disconnect the texture output from the diffuse to connect
it to the Glossy shader color input. Now we have the diffuse greenish color back and
the pink has been overridden, while the reflection component is visible only inside
the white bands of the wave texture (step 4 and 5).
In addition to the color output, every texture node has also a Fac output socket, out-
putting gray-scale linear values: connected to the Roughness input socket of the
Glossy shader, the texture is working has a factor for its reflectivity. The working
texture has a factor for its reflectivity; the spheroid keeps its colors and gets the
specular-mirrored component only in the white-colored areas on the surface (that is,
white bands equal to total reflecting and black bands equal to no reflection; step 6).
The Checker Texture fac ( factor ) output connected to the Fac input socket of the
Mix Shader node works in a similar way: the numeric slider for the mixing factor on
the Mix Shader node has disappeared, because now we are using the black and
white linear values of the Checker Texture fac output as a factor for the mixing of
the two components—the Diffuse and the Glossy —which, therefore, appear on the
spheroid surface accordingly to the black and white quads (steps 8 and 9).
Every texture node has several setting options; all of them have the Scale value to
set the size, the others change accordingly to the type of texture.
There's more...
At this point you could wonder: "ok, we just mapped a texture on the spheroid, but
what's the projection mode of this mapping?"