Materials - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 201

Figure 12-26: My screen layout for editing Cycles materials

I did the same for my specular color map, con-
necting it to the color input of the Specular Color
node. By default, the mapping for these textures is
the active UV coordinate set, so you don't strictly
need to define this manually. But because it can
help to know what coordinates a texture uses, I
added a Texture Coordinates node to the scene
and connected its UV output to the vector (blue)
input of my Image Texture nodes. Doing so tells

these nodes to use the active UV map as the source
of their texture coordinates. The node setup so far
is shown in Figure 12-27.

Socket Types
Now that I have a reasonably complex node setup
for the material, let's talk about node sockets. Node
sockets are the little colored circles that denote the

Figure 12-27: The evolving node setup for the Spider Bot material