When I first started using Blender procedural materials, I wondered how to get more than one material onto an object. In other systems I’d used, there was the idea of a “material map,” which was a grayscale image that defined where to put different colors or materials. For example, an image like this: …could be…
Tag: cycles
I’ve Finally Hit The Floor
Ever since I started exploring procedural wood shaders, I’ve wanted to then use those to make wooden planked floors. As I mentioned in a previous post, a wooden log is cut into boards by slicing it along the long axis of the trunk, moving outwards from the center. There are several ways to cut a…
Procedural Wood: From Oak To Maple Finale
If you’re just joining, be sure to check out the other parts of this post or this won’t make sense: Part 1 Part 2 We left off in the last post with the Maple shader looking pretty good, but it’s not quite there. As I have been known to do, I went to the local…
Procedural Wood: From Oak To Maple, Part 2
Last time we edited the scale of the wood. You might’ve noticed that in the Oak shader, the Y-coordinate was the same as X- and Z-, and now it’s 1. That’s something I realized was a mistake before, because we didn’t really want to scale the shader along the Y-axis. By making it 1, we’ll…
Procedural Wood: From Oak to Maple, Part 1
I wanted to show an example of a wood that is popularly used, but has different characteristics than Red Oak. I decided on Maple as I’ve worked on a Maple shader before and it’s different enough, yet there are enough similarities that the Oak shader is helpful. I was going to start at an earlier…
IMPORTANT: I’m Still Learning Too!
It’s been a while since my last post, and I was thinking I really need to get back into this. Fortunately, the Universe responded with a swift kick in the pants in the form of an astute reader named Ethos. Ethos has experience in woodworking, and not only asked me some great questions about the…
Corundum Conundrum
I started looking into how to create a realistic granite shader. While researching, I learned a lot of interesting things about gems and minerals and got distracted. For example, I didn’t know that rubies and sapphires are just variations of the same stone, called corundum. I thought it might be interesting to try to create…
More About Texture Coordinates
While creating the Red Oak shader, we used the “Object” coordinates: I mentioned that this will make the wood shader three-dimensional, as if our objects are carved out of a solid block of wood. The reason is that the Object used for the coordinates is by default the object that the shader is applied to….
My First Blender Add-on
I’ve got a background in programming, so I often think about writing a plugin or add-on for Blender, but I’ve never gotten around to it. A couple of days ago I finally did write something simple, and you can download it here: Distance-Based Subdivision It’s a simple script that sets Subdivision levels for objects in…
Shader Ball
I figured if I’m making shaders I should make a shader ball. I don’t know if this is any better or worse than others out there, but it was an interesting object to think about. I tried to make it minimalist but still with helpful details. Behold: You can download it from BlendSwap here.