Materials - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 196

click the + icon to make a new material by duplicat-
ing the one currently assigned. You can then modify
the duplicate leaving the original unchanged. This
is useful when creating a material similar to one you
have already made.
For the eyes, I created two new materials.
Recall that when I modeled the eyes in Chapter 5, I
created them as two separate parts: a cornea object
that forms the outer surface of the eye and an inner
part that would become the eyeball itself. Having
unwrapped and textured the inner part, I set up a
material similar to the skin material, with slightly
less red subsurface scattering. I also turned specu-
lar reflections for this material off (by setting the
specular intensity to 0), as the specular reflections
for the eye will come from the cornea object. I
applied the eye texture I painted in Chapter 11 as
the diffuse texture for the material.
For the cornea, I needed a shiny, transpar-
ent material that wouldn't cast a shadow on the
inner eye object. To produce this, I created a new
material assigned to this object. Then, I turned
on transparency in the Material settings and set it
to Z Transparency, with the alpha for the material
set to 0. These settings make a material transpar-
ent, with the exception of any specular and mirror
reflections, if they are present. I turned the specular
and hardness of the material up quite high, and
to prevent the material from casting shadows, I
disabled Traceable in the Options panel and Cast
Buffer shadows in the Shadows panel. The two mate-
rials for the eyes can be seen in Figure 12-20.

Fur
Materials for fur are a little more complex than
regular materials and require a bit of knowledge
about lighting and rendering. I'll cover the mate-
rial aspects here and some of the lighting aspects in
Chapter 13.
In Blender Internal, strand particles can be
rendered either like any other material or using
Blender's Strand rendering option. Blender's Strand
rendering option offers a much faster way to render
hair and fur, but it isn't compatible with ray-traced
shadows. Instead, it allows only for the rendering
of shadows using spot lamps with buffered shadows.
To enable strand rendering, use the Render
panel in the Particles tab of the Properties editor
(see Figure 12-21). For the Bat Creature, I opted to
use strand rendering. In Chapter 13, we'll discuss
creating an appropriate lighting setup for use with
this setup.

Figure 12-19: The SSS settings for the Bat Creature's
skin. Combined with the lighting from behind, sub-
surface scattering causes the wings to glow with light
scattering through them.

blend set to 0 gave a nice orange scattering. I set the
back scattering weight high to allow light to scatter
through the wings. This completed the skin material
for the Bat Creature.

Teeth, Nails, and Eyes
To create the materials for the teeth and nails, I
started by duplicating the material I created for the
skin, toning down the SSS effect, and increasing the
overall specularity to make these areas shinier.
To duplicate a material, assign it to an object.
Then, in the material selector drop-down menu,