Build Any Material in Blender: Shading Fundamentals (5.2 LTS)

CG Cookie in Video Tutorials

CORE Fundamentals
Course 04 of 11Created for 5.2 LTS29 lessons, 3h 18m
Materials & Shading, with Chris Bailey
Make anything look real.

29 lessons on the shaders behind every surface you have ever seen in a render: glass, skin, metal, smoke, hair. Then you put it all to use shading the alien and the specimen tank from Mesh Modeling. Rebuilt for Blender 5.2 LTS.

Specimen tank scene fully shaded and lit
Your renders look plastic.
You can't say why.

You crank the roughness slider until it looks less wrong. It still looks wrong. Metal reads like grey plastic, glass reads like grey plastic, skin reads like grey plastic with worse intentions.

That's because a surface is really several settings arguing with each other: how it bounces light, how much it lets through, how that changes at a glancing angle. Get one of those wrong and the whole illusion falls apart, even if you can't point to which one.

This course is that argument, broken into its parts, so you can win it on purpose instead of by accident.

The good news is that the list of things that can go wrong is fairly short.

What you'll build
Brushed metal, mixed and layered
01 / GLOSSY & DIFFUSE
Brushed metal, mixed and layered
Wax, marble, anything light gets lost inside
02 / VOLUME & SCATTER
Wax, marble, anything light gets lost inside
Fur, fuzz, anything with strands
03 / PRINCIPLED HAIR
Fur, fuzz, anything with strands
Smoke and fire, from a density grid
04 / PRINCIPLED VOLUME
Smoke and fire, from a density grid

Then Chapter 04's final challenge: shade the entire specimen lab from Mesh Modeling yourself.

No solution file. Anisotropy and glowing buttons strongly encouraged.

See it in motion
Testing a shader on the CG Cookie shader ball
Shader Ball
Every shader in this course gets tested on the same ball first, before it touches anything you actually care about.
 Testing a shader on the CG Cookie shader ball
Shader Nodes, Live
A node graph feeding a material, changing live in the viewport as it's built. This is most of the course, honestly.
What you'll learn
What a shader is, and how nodes build one. The Shader Editor, materials versus shaders, and assigning materials to different parts of a model.
Glossy, Diffuse, and how mixing beats picking one. Real surfaces are almost never a single shader. Mix and Add Shader nodes, explained.
Anisotropy, or why a DVD looks like that. Scratched metal, brushed steel, hair. One setting, more useful than it sounds.
Transparency, refraction, and glass that reads as glass. Glass has a very specific way of bending and holding onto light, and getting that right is what makes it read as glass.
Subsurface scattering and translucency. Skin, wax, marble, a leaf held up to the sun. Light that goes in and comes out somewhere else.
Volumes: scatter, absorption, and Principled Volume. Smoke, fire, and fog, built from density grids instead of surfaces.
Fresnel, the effect that's on every single object. Subtle, universal, and the reason flat-looking renders start looking dimensional.
Organizing a node graph you can still read in six months. Frames, reroutes, and node groups, so your shaders don't become a plate of spaghetti.
Curriculum

29 lessons across 4 chapters.

01
INTRODUCTION & SETUP
5 lessons
How materials imitate light, creating and assigning materials, the Shader Editor, and the render settings that affect how everything downstream will look.
02
SHADER TYPES
13 lessons
Glossy, Diffuse, Emission, Transparent, Holdout, Mix and Add, Refraction and Glass, Translucency, Subsurface Scattering, Metallic BSDF, Ray Portal, Volume Scatter and Absorption, Sheen and Toon. Every shader node, one at a time, then a practice lesson putting them together.
03
REALISM & THE PRINCIPLED SHADER
6 lessons
Fresnel, the effect hiding in every material you have ever looked at. Then the Principled BSDF, Principled Hair, and Principled Volume shaders, plus a full shading exercise on the alien and the specimen tank.
04
ORGANIZATION & THE CHALLENGE
5 lessons
Organizing complex node graphs, custom user input, node utilities, sharing materials between files, and the final challenge: shade the whole lab yourself.
Watch Fresnel & Roughness free

Six minutes on the effect that exists on every object in the world, including the mug on your desk right now. It's the single biggest reason a render starts looking dimensional instead of flat. No signup.

Watch the lesson free
Chris Bailey
Your instructor
CHRIS BAILEY

Chris teaches the modeling, sculpting, materials, texturing, animation, and geometry nodes track across CORE. This course builds on material written by CG Cookie co-founder Jonathan Lampel, expanded and re-recorded for 5.2 LTS.

Built to pair directly with Fundamentals of Texturing. Materials first, textures second. Doing it the other way around mostly just causes confusion.
What's included
Blender version 5.2 LTS (works in 4.2 LTS)
Lessons 29 videos, 3h 18m
Quality 1080p, stream or download
Captions English and Spanish
Project files Included, plus the specimen tank & alien
Platforms Windows, macOS, Linux
Access Yours to keep, no subscription
Also available in The CORE bundle, all 11 courses

No prior materials knowledge assumed. If you can assign a color to an object, you're ready.

Questions
Do I need Mesh Modeling first?
No, though the final project shades the specimen tank and alien from that course. Project files are included here too, so you can jump straight in.
Is this the same as texturing?
No, and this trips people up constantly. Materials are the shaders, the fundamental physical behavior of a surface. Textures are the images and maps you feed into those shaders. Take this course first.
Will this work in Blender 4.2 LTS?
Yes. A few panels have moved and EEVEE has picked up some speed, because Blender does that. The shader nodes themselves are identical.
Is this the same as the version I already own?
No. This is rebuilt for 5.2 LTS with new recordings and updated coverage. If you own the CORE 4.2 bundle, check your loyalty pricing.
Do I need to be good at math?
No. There's a little light color math, nothing beyond what you already do without thinking about it.
Am I ever going to use the Ray Portal shader?
Almost certainly not, and the course says so outright. It's covered because it's genuinely interesting, not because you need it.
I want more than one course. Is there a bundle?
Yes. CORE is all 11 courses as a single one-time purchase. Buy up to four courses individually and you come out ahead. Past that, the bundle costs less, and all eleven bought one at a time run to more than twice the bundle price. CORE is also included with an annual CG Cookie membership if you'd rather stream than own.
What if I get stuck?
Post in the CG Cookie community. Instructors are active there and questions get answered.
Course 04 of 11
CORE continues.

Materials & Shading is course four of eleven. CORE is the whole path: modeling, sculpting, lighting, materials, texturing, animation, rigging, physics, compositing, grease pencil, and geometry nodes, in the order that actually builds on itself.

Past four courses, the bundle is the cheaper buy. One purchase, and you keep it.

CG Cookie
Teaching Blender since 2008. We're old and stuff.
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Details
Published 3 months ago
Blender Version 5.2
Render Engine Used Cycles, Eevee
License Royalty Free

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