Exploring Materials in Blender

Up to now I was ignoring most of the options I had in the Diffuse settings section of the Materials settings panel (for Blender Internal). There are other ways to get the right 'lighting feel' for objects, including using the Node Editor, using light sources themselves, and using other aspects of the Materials panel, but I feel that this is a powerful one.

Here are two blends using just good old Suzanne. The experiments focus largely on distortion and painterly feel using the node editor, and colors manipulation using the Diffuse section of the Materials settings. Key aspects:

• The RenderLayers output are the monkey heads on a transparent background
• A noise texture is used to with a Displace node on the monkey heads to create a rough-edges paint feel
• A wood band texture is used with a Displace node to distort the monkey heads shapes in a psychedelic way
• The monkey heads are mixed with the paper texture via a Soft Light node and overlayed onto the paper with an Alpha Over node

The paper texture is from cgtextures.com.