Applying materials to projects

For this post I will be explaining how to apply materials to various shapes.

As I have before I started with the the material editor.

Under the Shader Basic Parameters there are various shading options available but for now I am going to use the 'Blinn' option which is just for general purpose shading.

Next I set the colours of the Diffuse (colour of material under normal light) and Specular (colour of highlights on the material)

I adjusted these to create a shinny metal look and then selected another slot and created a wood effect.

Now I defined the texture which is going to be placed on the object called a 'Map'. Using a bitmap means I can take a 2D image and wrap it around an object.

Next was to create an object to wrap my map around, I created a standard box shape and converted it to an editable poly. Now using another slot in the material editor I loaded my sample image to be used in my map. Using the toolbar below allows me to apply the map to the shape.

Assign Material to Selection (third button from the left) - Applies the map to the object.

Show Standard Map in Viewport ( fourth button from the right) - makes the map visible on the object.

I used this same process on multiple objects to see how the map was applied.

 Using the UVW Map Modifier allows for the direction of the projection of the map is applied to the object.

After converting the object to an editable poly the UVW map modifier can be applied which allows the GIZMO level to be selected when the rotation, scale and move options can be used. Changing these settings modifies now the image is projected onto the object.


Under the Mapping parameters there are various options for changing the way it is projected again, for example using the Planar option allows the image to be replicated multiple times across the object.

This is what the image looks like when the Wrap option is compared with the Sphere option.

Now I learnt about combining procedural maps together, for an exercise I will create clouds that can be seen through.


It involved using techniques I learnt earlier in the tutorial which created a final output like this:

I will use a similar method for creating the space in my animation.