Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Creating node groups
The single nodes (shaders, textures, input, or whatever) can be grouped together and
this is probably one of the best optimizations we can use to organize our workflow.
Thanks to node groups it's easy to store complex materials in ready-to-use libraries.
It's possible to share or reuse them in other files or they can also be used to build
handy shader interfaces, for easier tweaking of a material properties.
How to do it...
1. Start Blender and open the file
1301OS_02_09_basicshader.blend
:
2. It's a sphere leaning on a floor plane and with four little cubes at the plane's
corners; as you can see in the
Node Editor
, the sphere (the already se-
lected object) has a simple material composed by a
Diffuse
and a
Glossy
shaders mixed via the
Mix Shader
node.
3. Now box select (mouse cursor in the
Node Editor
, press
B
and drag a box
to include the nodes) the
Diffuse
and the
Glossy
nodes.
4. Press
Ctrl
+
G
on the keyboard, a pop up appears; left-click with the mouse
to confirm that you want to create a group of the selected nodes.
5. The two shaders get wrapped inside a box, that actually is the node group
in edit mode; that is, the node group is open and editable, and we can ac-
cess and modify its content.
6. Because the two shaders were already connected to the
Mix Shader
(that
in this case we left out of the group on purpose), both the
Diffuse
and
the
Glossy
outputs are now connected to two
BSDF
sockets automatically
created on the right side of the node group.
