Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
How to do it...
We just prepared the scene and took the first look at one of the more appreciated features
of Cycles since its first inclusion in Blender—the real-time-rendered preview (which, by the
way, is now also available in Blender Internal but seems to work faster in Cycles).
Now let's start with the object's materials:
1.
Select the Cube to assign the shader to by clicking on the item in the Outliner
window or right-clicking directly on the object in the Rendered viewport (but be
aware that in the Rendered mode, the object selection outline usually around
the mesh is not visible because it's obviously not renderable).
2.
Go to the Material window under the Properties panel. The Cube already has a
default material assigned (as you can precisely see under the Surface subpanel
within the Material window). By the way, you need to click on the Use Nodes button
under the Surface subpanel to activate the node system for the material. Instead of
this, you can also check the Use Nodes box in the toolbar of the Node Editor window.
3.
As you check the Use Nodes box, the content of the Surface tab changes, showing
that a Diffuse BSDF shader has been assigned to the Cube and that, accordingly,
two linked nodes have appeared inside the Node Editor window. The Diffuse BSDF
shader is already connected to the Surface input socket of a Material Output node.
4.
Put the mouse cursor in the Node Editor window, and by scrolling the mouse wheel,
zoom in to the Diffuse BSDF node. Click on the Color rectangle. A color wheel
appears, where you can select a new color to change the shader color by clicking
on the wheel itself or by inserting the RGB values (note that there is also a color
sampler and the alpha channel value, although the latter, in this case, doesn't
have any visible effect on the object material's color).
The color wheel of a Diffuse shader node in the Node Editor window and the Rendered 3D viewport preview
