Surfacing - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 164

Chapter 7
Surfacing
Targets for Building Believable Materials
Every surface in Blender requires a material. Materials define the way that light interacts with that surface.
Blender's material system allows a gigantic variety of settings. Too many, actually. Most of the ways that
you can set the properties will result in materials that couldn't exist in the physical universe, and if you
use them they will bring down your artwork. In this chapter, we're going to learn how to use Blender's
surfacing tools with an eye toward keeping it real.
A few very nontechnical rules will keep you well within where you should be:
1. Subtlety. In the real world, things rarely stand out because of their surfaces. Keep everything two
notches below what you think they should be.
2. Not everything that's there needs to be used. Blender has a seemingly limitless set of texturing and
material options, and not all of them will help you.
3. Observation. Look around you, carefully. Find references that match the things you are creating in
3D. Don't take it for granted that you know what a surface really looks like from memory.
And a few technical ones:
1. Surfaces don't give off more light than they receive.
2. Most objects in real life have surprisingly low glossiness and color saturation.
Basic Material and Texture Settings: Walls and Floor
Let's dig right into learning the material system by surfacing the walls and floor of our example room.
Figure 7.1 shows the Materials context of the Properties window. The top panel is the familiar interface
from working with multiple property sets, like the Vertex Group and Particle system panels from Chapter
6. This indicates right away that objects can have multiple materials. When you work with a new object