Materials and Textures

Select Gus, it is time to give him some nice cookie like material. In the Button Window toolbar press the red dot button (Figure 31) or use the F5 key.

The Button window will be almost empty because Gus has no materials yet. To add one, click on the white square button in the Button Window toolbar and select ADD NEW (Figure 32).

The Buttons window will be populated by buttons and a string holding the Material name, "Material" by default, will appear next to the white square button. Change this to something meaningful, like GingerBread.

Modify the default values as per Figure 33 to obtain a first rough material.

Press the small button with a white square on the right of the Material Buttons, in the Textures area (Figure 34) and select Add new. We're adding a texture in the first channel. Give it some name like "GingerTex"

Select the Texture Buttons by clicking the button in Figure 35 or by pressing F6

From the top row of ToggleButtons which appear select Stucci and set all parameters as in Figure 36.

Go back to the Material Buttons (F5) and set the Texture buttons as in Figure 37. The only settings to change should actually be the un-setting of the Col Toggle Button and the setting of the Nor Toggle Button and rising the Nor slider to 0.75. This will make our Stucci texture act as a "bumpmap" and make Gus look more biscuit-like.

You can also add a second texture, name it 'Grain' and make it affect only the Ref property with a 0.4 Var (Figure 38). The texture itself being a plain Noise texture.

Also give the ground an appropriate material. For example, the dark blue one shown in Figure 39.

To give some finishing touches we should add eyes and some other details.

First make Layer 1 the only visible by clicking with LMB on the layer 1 button (Figure 40). This will hide the lamps, camera and ground.

Place the cursor at the center of Gus' head, remember you are in 3D so you must check at least two views to be sure! Add a sphere (SPACE>>ADD>>Mesh>>UVsphere). You will be asked for the number of Segments: (meridians) and Rings: (parallels) into which to divide the sphere. The default of 32 is more than we need here, so use a value of 16 for both. The Sphere is in the first image top left of the sequence in Figure 41.

Scale it down (SKEY) to a factor 0.1 in all dimensions, then switch to side view (NUM3) and scale it only in the horizontal direction to a further 0.5 (Second two images in Figure 41).

Zoom a little if you need via NUM+ or MW or CTRL-MMB and drag, and move the sphere (GKEY) to the left so that it is half in, half out of the head (First image in the second row of Figure 41).

Go back to front view (NUM1) and move the sphere sideways to the right. Place it at a point where Gus should have an eye.

Flip a duplicate with respect to the cursor by following the sequence you learned when flipping Gus' body (Select the crosshair toolbar button, SHIFT-D, SKEY, XKEY, LMB). Now Gus has two eyes.

Exit out of EditMode, and place the cursor as close as you can at the center of Gus' face. Add a new sphere and scale/move it exactly as before, but make it smaller and place it lower than and right of the cursor, centered on the SubSurfed mesh vertex Figure 42).

Now, in the Edit Buttons (F9) locate at the center the group of buttons in Figure 43. Set Degr: to 90, Steps: to 3 and verify that the Clockwise: TogButton is on. Then press SpinDup. This will create 3 duplicates of the selected vertices on an arc of 90° centered at the cursor. The result is Gus' mouth, like the last image of the sequence in Figure 42.

Now you have learned this trick, add three more of these ellipsoids to form Gus' buttons. Once you have made one, you can simply exit from EditMode, press Shift-D to create a duplicate and move it into place, like in Figure 44.

Give the eyes a Chocolate-like material as per the one at the top in Figure 45. Give the mouth a White Sugar like material like the second one in Figure 45, and give the buttons a Red, White and Green sugar like material. From top to bottom, these are shown in Figure 45 too.

	Objects sharing a material
	To give an Object the same material as another object, select that material in the list which appears when you press the button with the white square in the ButtonWindow toolbar.

When you have finished assigning materials, set layer 10 visible again (you should know how by now), so that lights and the camera also appear, and do a new rendering (F12). The result should look more or less like Figure 47.

You might want to save your image now. Press F3. You will be presented with a file window, type in the name of your image and save.

	Image types and extension
	You must decide the image format (JPEG, PNG etc.) before pressing F3 by setting it in the Rendering Buttons (Figure 27 in the Section called Let's see what he looks like) and using the PopUp menu (Figure 48). Beware that Blender does not add the extension to the file name by default, it is up to you to type one in if you want.   Figure 48. File type selection menu in the Rendering Buttons window.