CORE | Fundamentals of Materials and Shading in Blender

Instructor:
Ewa Wierbik-ZiΔ…bka

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!Β 

Get Caught Up

Are you brand new to Blender?

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

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!

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Awarded upon completion:
100xp +
Course Curriculum
14 Reviews
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    Bernd GΓΌnther(bguenthe) ·

    Don't like this course. I expected an instruduction to materials and shading, but this is just a high level overview of shaders with some very advanced topics. The material basics in the mesh moddelling were better than this. I'll try the textures cource, we'll see

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    Andrii Shatalov(broov3rD) ·

    Honestly, the information is quite challenging to grasp. So far, it’s the hardest of all the courses. I’ll definitely be rewatching it more than once.

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    Alae Hatoum(Zickar) ·

    Great instructor, I love how short and specific each section was but at some point when we started to get into the more complicated shading I started tuning out because it felt like something aimed more at advanced users.

    What would have been great is if you covered specific materials that we use in our day to day renders such as porcelain, wax, car paint, etc....

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    Joshua Williams (2ndHouse) ·

    Just trying to give a helpful perspective. This felt more like a mixture of a fundamentals course and intermediate course, skewed too much towards intermediate. I get that shading / materials nodes is a complicated subject, but most of this was over my head for someone with just some very basic nodes experience.

    The course could of benefited from using the materials panel and basic node functionality more. The average user looking for fundamentals on this subject does not need to know about setting up complicated realistic glass and explosion shaders, ray portals, etc.

    This course focused a bit too much on what each shader, checkbox, and slider does and it becomes a little overwhelming. You're introduced to too many parameters. It needs to be less about that and more about creating some fun real world simple projects. Overall, it needs to be more geared towards beginning learners of the subject.

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    Sebastian Dorn(spooky) ·

    I've never seen such a bad shading course.

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    Kate Ha(Metaxa) ·

    chaotic, hard to follow

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    Can Manalp(CanManalp) ·

    4th courseΒ  of core, and I can say this is the one that I learned least of all. Just one section was enough. Especially section 3 and 4, you don't need to watch at all.

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    Luis Ruiz(Polyvice) ·

    I've try other course on this topic and none have been so precise like this one. If you're a beginner this is really amazing course, I recommend it!!

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    Mykyta Sichkar(nik2ki) ·

    If you are new to Blender, quickly take this course and dive deeper into creating materials in Blender 3D

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    Robert Elder(robward) ·

    Tons of information, I will be using so much.Β  A lot was covered.Β Β