Surfacing - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 223

Finishing Up
The chair is much like the table, and the process for applying materials and texturing is identical. Drop
the chair into Edit mode, and use Smart Project from the U-key unwrap menu. In the material properties,
click the icon to the left of the material's name and browse for the table material. Do a test render.
Remember that if you want to make adjustments to the material on the chair and not have it affect the
table, they are both linked to the same data block at the moment. You need to click the little number to
the right of the name to make the material local to the chair.
The shoes, hands, and room trim are left to you, with a few hints. The trim could be a dull white, as it
is in the provided sample scene, or you could make it a nice rich wood. The shoes can be given a brown
material with a bit of gloss, and a crackling texture to look like leather. The soles could be given a second,
separate material for black rubber. The hands can be textured or not, depending on what kind of time
you want to put into it. If you texture them, use the projection painting process like you did with the
head. For a general material, something that matches the overall tone of the face when SSS is enabled is
your target. Use the same SSS scale as the head material for consistency.
What We Missed
Not a whole lot, really. Admittedly, we skimped a bit on procedural textures, but there's a good reason
for that. I've seen people invest countless hours into learning procedural texturing systems, and they still
need to fight with them to get good results. Your time is better spent with a digital camera or a good
paint package. The one area we completely skipped is the nodes interface. Nodes are a completely different
way of looking at both the material and texturing pipelines, granting enormous control and flexibility.
Blender's implementation of nodes for materials is complex and can be quite confusing, but it is worth
looking up once you have these basic skills under your command.
Next Up …
In Chapter 8, we look at rendering and compositing. You've been hitting the Render button already
throughout the topic, but we get into the different portions of the renderer, optimizing your render times,
and using the integrated compositor to enhance the renderer's raw output.