• 🍪 Blender Basics Explore Library Guided Playlists Live Streams Articles Podcast Downloads Collabs Educators: Blender Teaching Guide What's Coming Soon Upgrade your membership
  • Questions & Answers Student Gallery Discord Channel YouTube Channel Citizen Membership Perks ✨
  • Kent Trammell Jonathan Lampel Wayne Dixon Paul Caggegi
    • Full Library
    single basicscorematerials

    CORE | Fundamentals of Materials and Shading in Blender

    Instructor:
    Ewa Wierbik-Ziąbka
    Subscribe
    ☆☆☆☆☆
     ( 4 )

    Understand the Basics of Materials and Shaders to Make Your 3D Renders Pop

    Materials and shaders are essential components in 3D rendering that define the appearance of surfaces. Materials determine how an object interacts with light, giving it properties like color, texture, and reflectivity. Shaders are algorithms that calculate these interactions, producing effects such as transparency, glossiness, and shadows.

    Having a basic knowledge of materials and shaders is crucial for rendering stunning images because they control the visual realism of your 3D models. Understanding how to create and manipulate them allows you to achieve the desired look and feel for your projects, making your renders more convincing and visually appealing.

    In this course, you'll learn the fundamentals of shader nodes, explore Blender's Eevee NEXT render engine, and master advanced rendering techniques. By the end, you'll have the skills to create stunning materials with Blender. Let's get started and bring your creativity to life! 

    Get Caught Up

    Are you brand new to Blender?

    These courses should help you get up to speed in no time.

    BLENDER BASICS: An Introduction to Blender 3D 4.X

    Free

    PRESS START: Your Simple First Blender Project

    What you'll learn in this Blender Class

    Chapter 1

    Introduction

    In this introduction chapter we will learn what version of Blender we need and we'll quickly go through all the lessons in the Materials and Shading course to see what we'll learn.

    Chapter 2

    The Basics of Blender Shader Nodes

    In this chapter we will learn basics or shader nodes, starting with the differences between the shader and the material, how to assign a material to the model or some parts of it. Then we will talk about available shaders and what we can use them for. At the end, we will learn how to organize the nodes to keep them nice and tidy.

    Chapter 3

    Overview of Eeevee NEXT

    In this chapter we will learn the basics of Eevee NEXT to use it in ours projects. We will explore some options and learn about screen space reflections, light probes, blended and dithered materials and shadows. We will also talk about the known limitations and how to find a workaround. We will also setup some of the materials to make them look good in Eevee, like glass, subsurface scattering or volumes.

    Chapter 4

    Rendering Materials and Shaders

    In this last chapter we will go through some render options that will help us to better understand what settings we should use to render a nice image. We will create realistic glass with dispersion and caustics to add more realism to our renders and learn how to use Light Path node.

    Let's create stunning materials!

    Watch the Course

    Get this course and 262 others by joining CG Cookie

    Join Now
    Awarded upon completion:
    100xp +
    Course Curriculum
    4 Reviews
    • B
      ☆☆☆☆☆
      Andrew Lawrance(ByAndrewsDesign) ·

      There is a lot of content covered in this course and it's clear the instructor Ewa has a lot of knowledge and experience in this. It's definitely worth the time, but I think a few core concepts and mechanical instructions may be missing or perhaps glossed over a little. In that way it feels a little more of an intermediate level course. Not a problem in my case as this is the 4th software I've done shader/ material work in and I was able to figure things out when they were missing; but if I were fresh, I could see myself being confused or left in the dark here and there. I assume some of that will be addressed in the other texturing/ materials course.

      I'd recommend updating the course name with (a part 1) if this is meant to be the course taken before the other texturing course. 

    • t
      ☆☆☆☆☆
      Ian Gamble(technicolorwildlife) ·

      I've done a bunch of the older fundamentals, but Ewa managed to pack a lot in here and I learned some new things!

    • ☆☆☆☆☆
      Lewis Thorpe(DripInspector) ·

      A great refresher for my rusty shader knowledge. I learned a lot of cool tricks and technical insights into how shaders work. 

    • ☆☆☆☆☆
      Dwayne Savage(dillenbata3) ·

      I learned a lot. I'm excited to move on to texturing course. Thanks for your hard work.