Materials - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 209

General Tips for Creating Materials
Here are some general principles to keep in mind
when creating materials in your projects. Chiefly,
they involve paying attention to the real-world equiv-
alents of the materials you are trying to replicate
and constructing your material accordingly:

In Review
In this chapter, we started with a look at Blender's
options for creating materials, both for the Blender
Internal renderer and Cycles. Because these two
render engines require different approaches when
creating materials, we explored their different
options and requirements. Then we moved on to
creating materials for the three projects. For the
Bat Creature, I created Blender Internal-compatible
materials for the body, fur, eyes, nails, and teeth.
For the body, I created a material with subsurface
scattering to mimic realistic skin, and for the fur, I
covered the different options for fur materials and
rendering. I used Blender's strand shader to render
the fur and examined ways to apply textures to fur.
For the Spider Bot and the Jungle Temple scene,
I created materials for rendering with Cycles, using
Blender's Node editor to create a range of different
materials by combining Shader nodes and using tex-
tures to supply their inputs.
The projects are now ready to be lit and ren-
dered. In Chapter 13, you'll learn about different
lighting setups and how to use lighting in both
Blender Internal and Cycles.

Keep reflection amounts sane. Make sure that the
total amount of light your object is reflecting is
sensible. When using the Add node to combine
shaders in Cycles, it's possible to create a mate-
rial that reflects more light than it would real-
istically receive in the first place by adding too
many shaders together. Similarly, in Blender
Internal, keep in mind that the diffuse and
specular reflection amounts (plus the light
absorbed by the object) should roughly add
up to 1—for example, a diffuse intensity of 0.6
and a specular intensity of 0.3, leaving some
absorbed light to spare. Otherwise, your mate-
rial will look unrealistically bright next to other
materials.

There are no perfect materials. No material
reflects 100 percent of all light, and no mate-
rial absorbs 100 percent either. Try not to make
any materials that are completely dark or com-
pletely white (unless you are doing so for a good
reason).

Use saturation in moderation. The color of a mate-
rial is rarely 100 percent saturated, even for
brightly colored materials like plastics. Most
everyday colors are less than 85 percent satu-
rated, so keep the colors of your materials in a
sensible range to make them believable.

Keep it simple. Try to avoid making complex materi-
als to ensure shorter render times. For example,
in Blender Internal, try to use ray-traced reflec-
tions only when really needed.

Supplement materials with procedural textures.
Blender's built-in procedural textures are a
great way to supplement materials by using
them as bump maps or to blend other textures.
Doing so can add a lot of variation to your mate-
rials while preventing you from having to labori-
ously hand-paint textures.