Materials are like paint. With materials, you make apples red and oranges orange. You put the shine in chrome and the polish on glass. By applying maps, you can add images, patterns, and even surface texture to objects. Materials are what make your scenes look real.
Mapping is a method of projecting pictorial information (materials) onto surfaces. It is a lot like wrapping a present with wrapping paper, except the pattern is projected mathematically, with modifiers, rather than being taped to the surface.
This tutorial introduces the Material Editor, the master design studio for materials and maps. In the following tutorials, you will learn how to assign materials to objects, how to create basic materials, and how to apply textures.
Features Covered in This Section
In this tutorial, you will use a model of a Mediterranean villa to learn more about materials and how they can improve the realism of a scene.
A composite map layers two or more texture maps onto one another, in order to produce a more detailed image.
This tutorial shows you how to map a material to a curved surface, such as a road or a garden hose.
You can apply multiple Multi/Sub-Maps to objects in a scene whenever you need to give similar objects in a group their own unique identity.
The Unwrap UVW modifier helps you map textures onto complex geometry.
