Blender 3D Animation 7

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Shaders
Determines how a material reacts with the visible lights. Ref. is a option that sets how much light is reflected, higher value gives brighter relfection while lower value gives darker reflection.

Specular
It controls a kind of reflection of light, which depends on the point of view and the angle at which the light hits the surface. This shader is very important to set up materials such as glass, metals and other reflective surfaces.

• Spec: Set how hard the specular reflection is. High values will make the reflection stronger.
  
• Hard: A soft or hard border gor specular reflections.

Ray Tracing
Materials that use ray tracing parameters can have an extra level of realism, as they can show reflections and transparency based on more sophisticated calculations. With these options, more realistice materials such as glass and mirrors can be created.

Creating Glass
To create good glass or transparent material, turn on the Ray Trans button. All materials will eventually have a better transparency. Use Alpha vaule to make the material transparents.

Another aspect of transparency that we can set up is theIOR, which determines how the object changes the light rays' trajectories.The base value for some kinds of materials can be preconfigured, according to these values:

• Glass: 1.5
  
• Water: 1.33


• Diamond: 2.4
  
• Plastic: 1.43
  

*Make sure that the Ray button is turned on in the rendering options to get the effect!

Simple Glass
To produce a simple glass, just decrease the Alpha value and turn on the ZTransp button. (under Links and Pipeline) ZTransp is different from the Ray Mirror option in that, Ztransp is simpler and faster but not very realistic.

Mirrors and Reflections
To use reflections, user musr turn on the Ray Mirror button and set up the RayMir slider. Higher values will produce a stronger reflection, and make the material look like a mirror. Fresnel Slider controls the amount of reflection and how reflective an object is based on the angle from which we view the surface. Fresnel value = 0 gives user a perfect mirror. Fresnel setting can be used for reflections and transparency as well, with the same objective, that is, to control the amount of ray trace by the viewing angle. Right next to Fresnel is the Fac option which is used to control the blending amount for the Fresnel effect. * To create mirrors, remember to change the material colour to something close to black.

Ray-traced Shadows
User has a window with a glass that is green. In the real world, all the shadows cast by this glass wont be a hundred percent black and will turn their colour to green. This can be achieve in Blender. Turn TraShadow parameter in the Shaders menu. This option must be turned on for the material that has to receive the shawdow, and not the one that will cast it.

Wireframe Materials
To show a more structured view of a 3D model, just select the material and turn on the Wire option in links and Pipeline.

Self-illumination
Allows user to set up a material to meit light. However, it will not generate any kind of illumination for the scene, it will only make the material brighter. Emit parameter in the Shader menu

Texture Library

• http:// www.blender-texture.org
• http://www.cgtextures.com
• http://blender-archi.tuxfamily.org/textures

Load texture Image
Click on the Load button situated on the Image menu. Locate the image file and the texture will be applied. A list of what some of the buttons can do for the texture:

1. Use Alpha: If the texture has an alpha channel, we have to press this button for Blender calculate the channel. (e.g PNG)
   
2. Rot90: Rotate texture by 90 degrees.


3. Repeat: Texture that distribute on the object surface and repeating the texture in lines and columns is the default way to do that.


4. Extended: Texture will be adjusted to fill all the object surface area.
   
5. Clip: Texture will be cropped, to adjust which parts of the texture will be displayed, use Min/Max X/Y options.
   
6. Xrepeat/ Yrepeat: Determines how many times a texture is repeated with the repeat option on.
   
7. Normal Map: If texture is used to create Normal Maps, press this button and they are used to change the face normals of an object.
   
8. Still: Determines taht the image used as texture is a still image. This option is marked by default.
   
9. Movie: If user has to use movie file as texture, press this button. This is very useful if we need to make something like a threatre projection screen or a tv screen.
   
10. Sequence: Use a sequence of images as texture too, press this button, works the same ways as a movie file.

When a texture is added, an external link is created with this file. This link can be absolute or relative. Absolute link refers to link that is not save in the same folder as all other related source files. Relative link refers to the link of the texture located in the same folder as the scene and other source files. Therefore every time an absolute link is used and user have to move the ".blend" file to another computer, the texturee file must go with it. Press the icon of gift package to solve the problem.

Mapping
Avoid effects such as stretched texture when some texture is meant for cube or sphere, Set this up in mapping options which are located on the Map Input Menu.