Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Bot using the Materials tab of the Properties editor,
though it's even easier to accomplish using an add-on
called Material Utils.
Material Utils Add-On
The Material Utils add-on is a quick way to modify
materials assigned to your models. It's particularly
useful for working with scenes that use a lot of mate-
rials or ones with multiple objects that share the
same materials.
To enable the add-on, open Blender's User
Preferences Editor (you can bring this up by going
to File 4 User Preferences) and under Add-Ons,
search for and enable Material Utils . This adds a
new keyboard shortcut ( Q ), which brings up a menu
that you can use in either Object or Edit mode to
assign materials to meshes (see Figure 10-13). In
Object mode, the add-on allows you to assign mate-
rials to an entire object (or to multiple objects if
more than one is selected), while in Edit mode, it
will assign a material only to the part of the mesh
you have selected.
For the Spider Bot, I quickly applied the same
material to every object in the model by selecting
them all with A and then using Material Utils ( Q )
to assign one of my basic materials to all of them.
Then, I began selecting individual pieces (and also
dropping into Edit mode with tab to select parts
of meshes, as in Figure 10-13) and assigning other
materials from the three I created. My overall goal
was to keep one main color, one secondary color,
and a highlight color for small or interesting parts
Figure 10-12: The final baked ambient occlusion texture for
the Spider Bot
Baking Diffuse Colors and Textures
In order to get a rough feel for the colors I wanted
the Spider Bot to have and to bake these into a
map to serve as a guide for the texture painting
process, I needed to create some basic materials
and assign them to the different parts of my model.
These materials didn't need to be complex; in fact, I
needed only to adjust the diffuse color setting. (I'll
discuss more complex materials in Chapter 12.)
To create a few basic materials:
1.
Go to the Materials tab of the Properties editor
(with an object selected) and click the +New
button to create a new material.
2.
Click the name Material to rename it something
more useful, like Basic_Fill_01 , and then set the
diffuse color to a mid-gray color.
3.
Create more materials by duplicating this first
one (click the + icon next to the material's
name) and set these to different colors.
When working with the new materials, I began
by choosing three colors: one principal color for most
of the model, a secondary color, and a highlight color
for small details. I then started assigning these mate-
rials to the different objects that made up the Spider
Figure 10-13: Assigning materials with the Material Utils add-
on ( Q ) greatly speeds up adding materials to your scene,
particularly for scenes with a lot of objects.
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