Materials - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 204

Stone Material
For my stone material, I wanted to combine the two
different stone textures I made in Chapter 11, allow-
ing each to show through in different areas, to give
a bit of variation in the look of the material. To do
so, I started by creating a basic shader that mixed a
diffuse and glossy shader together using a Shader
Mix node. I controlled the amount of mixing with
a Layer Weight node, using its blend output. The
Layer Weight node blends from 0 to 1 depending on
the normals of a mesh: Surfaces facing the camera
get low values, and ones facing away get high values
(the exact values depend on the output used—
facing or fresnel). Using the Facing output of this
node to control the blending between the glossy
and diffuse shaders produced some shiny highlights
around the edges of objects with a more diffuse look
when viewed straight on, as shown in section ❶ of
Figure 12-32.
To create a patchy distribution for the differ-
ent stone textures, I combined a couple of Voronoi
Texture nodes with different scales and then used
these to control the mixing between the different
textures for the rocks for both the specular and
diffuse maps, as shown in Figure 12-32 ❷ . I also
used some Map nodes to scale up the texture map-
pings for my rock textures to make them match one
another and fit the scale of the scene, which you can
see in Figure 12-32 ❸ .

Figure 12-30: The look of the finished Spider Bot material.
See Chapters 13 and 14 for information on lighting and
rendering.

Ground
The ground material was probably the simplest to
create. It's simply a mix of a Diffuse and a Glossy
BSDF shader, using my painted textures as inputs
for the colors. Because I felt my original textures
made the material look a little light, I used a Gamma
node to darken them slightly without losing too
much contrast (see Figure 12-31).

Figure 12-31: The soil for the Jungle Temple scene