Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
1
Overview of Materials
in Cycles
In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:
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An overview of material nodes in Cycles
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An overview of procedural textures in Cycles
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How to set the World material
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Creating a mesh-light material
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Using volume materials
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Using displacement
Introduction
Cycles' materials work in a totally different way than in Blender Internal.
In Blender Internal, you can build a material by choosing a diffuse and a specular shader
from the Material window, by setting several surface options, and then by assigning textures
(both procedurals and image maps as well) in the provided slots. All of these steps make one
complete material. After this, it's possible to combine two or more of these materials by a
network of nodes, thereby obtaining a lot more flexibility in a shader's creation. However, the
single materials themselves are the same as those set through the Material window—shaders
made for a scan-line-rendering engine—and their result is just an approximation of the simulated
absorption-reflection behavior of light on a surface.
