Does anyone know of a good tutorial on MATERIAL nodes. I’ve Googled it many times, I get one that I must pay for, or are for compositing. And/or,even better, a thing that explains what each different node does.
Cycles or Blender Render?
Sorry, slight error on my part. Cycles!
A good place to start is Andrew Price’s intro to cycles video http://www.blenderguru.com/videos/introduction-to-cycles/
For a detailed description of what each node does, I’ve never found anything good and comprehensive. I’ve built up knowledge over time, a few nodes more each time I explore. I learned about the Fresnel shader by asking on http://blender.stackexchange.com/ how one could imitate the Glass shader using only other shaders. There are some shaders I have no clue about yet.
The current Blender manual gives an idea, but I found it not quite deep enough and I’d like more examples and street-smarts on using them. The manual is at http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Materials/
I tried to start something like that in the first link I posted above.