hello,
i’ve been searching for a good, kind of thorough guide to materials and shaders; i didn’t like the official wiki much… and i frankly find the terms confusing because everyone who creates a shader gets the shader’s name… anyway, i don’t plan to change the world
so if anyone knows of a good and thorough but easy to digest guide, please reply…
thanks
Yea, that would definitely be useful information. I’m just wondering, when people say that they ‘write’ shaders, what does that exactly mean? Do you write shaders in Python? Or in another language, and is it only for Renderman compliant renderers, or is it also possible to write shaders for Blender Internal etc. Clarification on this subject would be greatly appreciated.
i was referring to guys like Mr. Phong and Mr. Oren and Ms. Nayar… i don’t know if Toon is a Mr. too…
but yeah, if someone can provide information on what you said, i wouldn’t mind it… though i’m not really into scripting yet… 
Oh yea, got a bit confused there. If you just want to know about that, here is a short quote from the Essential Blender book which might help.
Blender’s renderer has several options available for how exactly to shade the 3D geometry you’ve created. The top set of controls is for Diffuse shading, which is the way that the renderer calculates the general shading of the object. Here’s a short breakdown of most of what is available, and for what each might be best suited.
Lambert: Blender’s default shading option. This is a good shading model for plastics and other glossy, fairly smooth substances.
Minnaert: This shader allows you to affect the way that light plays on the portions of your geometry that face the camera directly, as well as the portions that are perpendicular to it. Varying the Dark slider and watching the Preview panel will quickly give you a feel for how it reacts. This shader is useful for cloths, especially deep ones like velvet, and can also be used (with Dark set carefully to lower values) for giving an ever present backlight effect to objects.
Oren-Nayer: A great general shading model for matte surfaces. Unless you are working with one of the special cases mentioned in the other shader descriptions (cloth, plastic, etc.), try this. Although it doesn’t actually generate any texturing based on the “Roughness” value, it does simulate the more diffuse scattering that such a surface would produce. As such, it works well as a basis for human skin materials.
Toon: Toon shading breaks the shading into three flat regions - shadow, mid-tone and highlight, and allows you to control the sharpness of the boundaries between them. Used correctly in combination with the Toon specular shader and the edge rendering option, this can produce an effect much like the standard three-part shading of the majority of today’s hand-drawn animation.
Although each Diffuse shader has slightly different controls, they all have a Ref (Reflectance) value. This represents the amount of light that reflects from the surface and reaches the camera. A Ref value of 0.8 means that 80% of the light that reaches the surface from the scene’s lamps is used for shading purposes. It is up to you to determine how reactive your material will be to light, but for most cases 0.8 is a good starting point.
The lower set of controls is for materials that have specular highlights. Specular highlighting is a way of faking the reflectance of a light source itself on a surface. Don’t go overboard with specular highlighting - just because it’s there doesn’t mean you have to use it. Many times real world materials that you are trying to simulate will appear more believable if you set the Spec value to 0 or very near it. In general, the Spec value indicates the intensity of the highlight (using the Spe color from the Material tab - remember that metallic objects should have highlights colored near to their base color), while the Hard value controls the size of the highlight (“Harder” substances like glass or diamond exhibit tiny, tight highlights, while softer substances like cloth would have a larger highlight area).
The Blinn specular shader pairs well with the Oren-Nayer diffuse shader for most matte and naturally occurring surfaces. Phong works well for glossy plastics. Phong and CookTorr seem to produce good results for shiny metallics, as long as the Spe color is adjusted properly.
well, that’s no where close to thorough… but thanks any other suggestions?
i found this actually http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BSoD/Introduction_to_Materials/exercise_2
looks ok
If you really want to know what is behind each shader name (other than Toon. Mr. Toon does not seem to exist in Wikipedia </jk>) You can read articles in Wikipedia here is an index for CG shaders: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_shading_algorithms
That’s a good link! Explains a lot about the basic shaders for me too!
thanks a lot DichotomyMatt,
i’m still open to suggestion on thorough material editing… if there isn’t any, i’ll have to bite the bullet and read the official manual…
If you don’t like reading the Wiki how about watching some videos. Try this set at Blender Underground: http://blenderunderground.com/2008/02/07/blender-basics-part-5-material-foundations/
that’s great,
i’ve been there once but i didn’t know they had video tutorials on material editing, thanks again DichotomyMatt…
cheers