# Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Materials and Textures

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In 3D graphics, materials and textures are nearly as important as
shapes. Scenes would be boring if all the objects were gray.

The  in Blender allows
you to model a wide variety of materials and how they interact with
light. The next few modules will introduce the available options.

## Material versus Texture

A  defines the optical
properties of an object: its color and whether it is dull or shiny. A
 is a pattern that breaks up
the uniform appearance of the material. Very few objects in the real
world have completely uniform surfaces. Instead most of them have
patterning or variation in color: consider the grain in a piece of wood,
the pile in a carpet, or the mortar in a brick wall.

Blender allows textures to influence materials in various ways, such as
altering their colors. Multiple textures can interact with each other to
produce interesting effects.

Note that textures have to be attached to materials to affect objects,
you cannot apply a texture to an object without a material.

## Other Material Settings

Additional settings you can specify for a material include
,
 and
.

Shaders determine how the appearance of a material varies with the angle
of the light:  shaders give a
non-shiny look, while 
shaders give a mirror-like finish. Blender\'s material settings always
involve both kinds of shaders, but you can adjust a material\'s diffuse
and specular colours separately to control their respective effects; if
you set the specular colour to black, the surface will no longer produce
reflections.

Ray-tracing is a technique for modeling the physical path of light
through the scene. It is capable of producing exquisite reflection and
refraction effects, including different degrees of reflectivity,
translucency and transparency, and representing materials with different
indexes of refraction. Blender provides two separate groups of
ray-tracing settings, one for reflection of light and the other for its
transmission through the material. You can control these settings on a
per-material basis.

Halo rendering means an object no longer looks like solid matter,
instead it appears to be made of bits of light. This can be used for
real-world effects like fire, smoke and plasma, or to create fantasy
effects with no connection to reality.

Note that reflections produced by ray-tracing are separate from that
produced by the specular shader: the former are controlled by the
material\'s mirror colour, while the latter is controlled by its
specular colour.

Reflection is done in two different ways because, while ray-tracing
produces the most realistic renders, it is also very CPU-intensive. It
is therefore best to apply the ray-tracing effects when you\'re
completely done with your modelling to help reduce high CPU usage.
Enough practice with ray-tracing can also help you get stunning effects
with just few clicks without you having to do much trial and error. You
would do well to dedicate at least a few hours of your time to
experimenting with it, so that in a future real production situation,
you will be spared all that hassle.

## Types of Textures

When you create a texture in Blender, you will see a popup menu listing
a whole lot of different types for the texture. The
 texture type lets you
use a scanned image to texture your object: for example, you can scan an
actual piece of metal and use that to give your object a realistic
metallic appearance, or use a photograph of an actual brick wall to
texture the wall of a building model, and so on. You could even use a
movie, which plays during the animation of the scene.

The other texture types are called
, which means the textures
are generated according to algorithms built into Blender itself. These
can be useful for simulating various effects when you don't have an
image of the real material handy; they can also be applied to augment
the appearance in various ways. For example:

-   using a "cloud" texture to "dirty-up" a material

:   or

-   using one texture as a stencil to create an amalgam of two other
    textures.

## Additional Resources

