CORE | Fundamentals of Materials and Shading in Blender

Instructor:
Ewa Wierbik-Ziąbka

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! 

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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
11 Reviews
  • 2
    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.

  • s
    Sebastian Dorn(spooky) ·

    I've never seen such a bad shading course.

  • M
    Kate Ha(Metaxa) ·

    chaotic, hard to follow

  • C
    Can Manalp(CanManalp) ·

    4th course  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.

  • 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!!

  • Mykyta Sichkar(nik2ki) ·

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

  • r
    Robert Elder(robward) ·

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

  • B
    Andrew L(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.