Summary

Throughout this chapter, you learned how materials can be used to give objects a different look. To create materials, you used the Material panel as a workbench to prepare many materials at once, and later assign these materials to different objects.

Shaders are almost inseparable from materials, and you got a glimpse of how many options they come with. You also saw that you can pick different shaders for your materials. However, most of the time, Blender’s default shader, Principled BSDF, will be enough.

Using the default shader, you created a few materials that have different qualities, such as wood and steel. Furthermore, you discovered ways to create different-looking metal surfaces by utilizing metallic, specular, and roughness properties with varying intensities.

There is another topic that is usually covered alongside materials and shaders: textures. It was intentionally omitted, but it’ll be covered in the next chapter with an explanation of...