What the Heck do all these Settings do? A Full Guide to Blender Cycles Materials

By now most of us have probably heard of the new Cycles render engine, which will bring a long overdue upgrade to our Render Engine. While Cycles’s rendering capabilities rival those of Luxrender and other external renderers, and is much faster, its materials system is entirely new and has done away with many of the sliders and options that we have come to know and love in Blender Internal. The new Cycles Materials can be confusing and intimidating, so I’ve made this tutorial covering all the new settings you’ll find in Cycles.

Diffuse is your basic, Clay render material. While it can be boring, it’s very useful for adding some shading to other materials when mixed, which we will get to later.

Color controls the color of the material. A texture can be added by clicking the tiny button. A dropdown menu will give choices for a variety of Procedural Textures.

By default, it’s already set to an RGB texture. The RGB texture simply gives a solid color to the material.

Procedural textures can be added like this clouds texture. They can be edited right in the Materials Panel too. It’s been oversimplified in Cycles, but the basics are still there. Instead of being assigned influence values, textures are given to settings to control their value. In other materials, textures can affect the fresnel, roughness, etc.

The glass material is a refracting, transparent material.

Roughness controls how glossy the Glass is.

Obviously, this determines the Index of Refraction.

Glossy is a shiny, reflective material. It has the equivalent of 1.0 Mirror.

However, at higher values, you get a more matte shading.

Shading methods like Sharp make the reflection completely sharp.

Transluscent shading results in a rough wax-like material, which allows light to pass and scatter through and illuminate the opposite side.

Transparent materials are Transparent, with no Refraction or Fresnel. Only pure white Transparent materials are completely transparent.

Velvet is a Fresnel Shader which lightens the edges, and causes light rays to bounce in every direction when striking the mesh.

Emission is self describing. Cycles uses object based lighting along with Blender’s internal lamp system, so the emission material turns an object into a lamp.

The strength determines how bright the object is.

Mix Closure creates two slots for two new materials, a.k.a. closures.

You can even make the materials in the slots “Mix Closure”s and make an even more complicated material.

This Mix between a Diffuse and a Glossy creates this nice, glazed Ceramic material.

Anyone who’s ever done any compositing knows that “add” means to add two values to produce a stronger or brighter result instead of averaging them out. That’s what “Add Closure” does.

Background will only work if it’s given to the World Panel. Volume is not in Vanilla Cycles, but it and an Oren-Nayar shader patch are being worked on independently.

For more, check out the Cycles manual.