here ya go part 3 of 2.5 tour #9 : Materials and shading
http://blenderlabrat.blogspot.com/2009/10/25-tour-9-part-3-materialsshading.html
Hope you all enjoy it :eyebrowlift:
dang, mfox you have been busy doing the video thing lately 
Nice tour
Now I just have to wait for proportional editing to come back and I can start doing modelling with 2.5!
Thanks a lot for all your videos. It is a fantastic help for us with no time to try out all the builds and lurk around on mailing lists
Assigning materials to vertex groups (What you are doing about half way into the video, when you forgot to make a new material slot. I can’t give you the exact time because the timing in the video is screwed up) is not what you are doing it seems. The only reason you can assign the blue material to some of the faces on suzanne is because the faces were already selected from the start. It is not in itself linked in any way to the vertex group… Right?
mfoxdogg: Assigning materials to faces does work. In Blender, you never assigned materials to vertex groups. Instead, you could assign material indices directly to faces, and this still works in 2.5. In the video you kept re-assigning the same single material index to the faces, when you should fist create a new material index (using the plus button to the right of the material list), and then click Assign.
It is already back! But the shortcut doesn’t work.
mfoxdogg are you a developer? Your tours are so indepth :o
The reason your musgrave texture didn’t come out when you rendered the volume is you didn’t check the RGB to intensity box in the texture panel. I learned a few things from you thanks for it… here’s my tutorial for volumes if you’re interested…
p.s. nodes stopped working recently so beware trying this on current svn, I tried to post this info on your video blog, but I don’t have an account.