Need help with the Materials tab

AlAmira · July 15, 2017, 4:33am

Hi,

First of all, sorry for the noob question, I probably have less than ten hours in Blender at the moment so there is a high probability that the answer is completely obvious, I did look through the forum but I might have missed it if the issue has been brought up before.

So I have this issue that is driving me slightly insane. Whenever I create a new project and want to apply a material to any of the objects within it I seem to get a very limited choice on what I can add and/or alter. I noticed that the… err, menu-panel-thingie that appears after going to “Material” doesn’t even look remotely the same as it did in a previous project.

I uploaded four screenshots which might help me explain the issue a little bit more.
So, as you can see on the first image, there are four “buttons” called “Surface”, “Wire”, “Volume” and, “Halo” which I didn’t have in my first project (which can be seen in image number three - “Surface” was its own sub-section there). So I can, change colour and the like (roughness, intensity amongst other things) but when I go to the “Diffuse” sub-section (which btw, isn’t even a sub-section on my first project) I can only choose between five different shaders.

I thought that perhaps I could add and remove shaders (such as diffuse, glossy and so on and so forth) in the node editor… oh how wrong I was, I can’t add anything in node editor mode either as all the options are greyed out.

So my question is, how do I revert it back to how it is in image number three? I don’t recall having had to change anything to get it like how it was there - nor do I recall changing anything to make it look how it is now (although I have surely changed something - I just don’t know what, when or how). Restoring to default didn’t change anything and neither does restarting the program and/or computer. My next step is reinstalling Blender all together, but I figured that there has got to be another way (and probably a very simple one at that) of solving the issue.

Any suggestions or help would be immensely appreciated.

Screenshots

Image number two and four are just shots showing the different shaders.

Richard_Marklew · July 15, 2017, 5:54am

So, as you can see on the first image, there are four “buttons” called “Surface”, “Wire”, “Volume” and, “Halo” which I didn’t have in my first project (which can be seen in image number three - “Surface” was its own sub-section there). So I can, change colour and the like (roughness, intensity amongst other things) but when I go to the “Diffuse” sub-section (which btw, isn’t even a sub-section on my first project) I can only choose between five different shaders.
The first is using the default Blender Render engine and the second using the Cycles Render engine. Each have their own material systems.
Change the render engine from the top of the blender interface

AlAmira · July 15, 2017, 9:55am

That did it! Thanks a lot for the help!