# Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Metal Versus Plastic

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There are different kinds of shiny materials. Consider the difference
between a shiny metallic object, and one made out of a glossy
nonmetallic material (like plastic or ceramic). This page will explain
some simple techniques for (approximately) mimicking the appearances of
these materials using shader settings in the Blender Internal renderer.

For all the following manipulations, start a new Blender document, get
rid of the default cube, and replace it with a UV sphere. Set it to be
smooth-shaded. Change the lamp falloff to be inverse linear, just to
make the scene brighter. Assign the sphere a new default material. It is
the settings of this material we will now proceed to play around with.

## Making It Plastic

![](PlastickyMagentaBall.png "PlastickyMagentaBall.png") For a plastic
or glossy effect, give the material a diffuse colour, but leave the
specular colour at white. Increase the specular intensity to something
like 0.9.

(In this and the following examples, I used a diffuse colour of
#E7398B.)

## Making It Metal

![](MetallicMagentaBall.png "MetallicMagentaBall.png") Now change the
specular colour to be the same as the diffuse colour. (The easy way to
do this is to bring up the specular colour picker, click on its
eyedropper icon, and use the eyedropper tool to click on the swatch
showing the diffuse colour.) Also lower the specular hardness from its
default value of 50, to something like 25 or even 12. This will spread
out the specular highlight, giving the impression of a surface that is
shiny, but not perfectly smooth. Also lower the diffuse intensity, to
something like 0.05.

To make the metal more convincing, you may want to choose a more typical
metal colour, like grey, copper or bronze.

## Making It Ceramic

![](CeramicMagentaBall.png "CeramicMagentaBall.png") Let's try for a
glazed-ceramic look, or perhaps some dark, shiny stone like obsidian.
Set the specular colour back to white (the easiest way to do this is to
switch to HSV view in the colour picker and set the S(aturation) value
to 0). Increase the hardness to something like 200 to narrow and
intensify the specular highlight. Leave the specular intensity high and
the diffuse intensity low.

To get an even more sharply-focused highlight, change the specular
shader model from its "CookTorr" default to "WardIso". The "Hardness"
parameter gets replaced with a "Slope" instead; leave this at the
default 0.1.

