How to Color Models in Blender | Setting Material Beginner Tutorial

during this tutorial you'll learn how to add a splash of color to your 3D models whether you want to include a single color or make it multi-colored we will look at the best practices and techniques for the blender beginner [Music] I have my model in place ready to receive plenty of color to start let's double check we're on viewport shading material preview in order to see color materials as we add them to our model make sure that the object you want to add color to is selected in the outliner if you can't see the outliner then either swat out an existing viewport to outliner or left click and drag in the corner of a viewport to create a new one you can change the viewport to outliner by left clicking here and selecting outliner from the drop down your model should be highlighted in the outliner if it is selected if it is not then simply left click on it now that your model is selected in the outliner click on the material properties tab down here this will bring up options for creating and managing the materials and colors for your model left click on the new button found here to generate a new slot this will add a new default material within a single slot this single slot will assign the new material to the entire model it is a good idea at this point to rename your material left click in the name field and type in a descriptive name for your material for the sake of this tutorial I will name it character dot base dot skin as it is going to be the base skin color for my model notice that I haven't used any spaces capital letters or symbols I have swapped out any spaces with full stops this is good practice and using this kind of naming convention will help you in the future when sharing importing and exporting your project work keeping everything consistent now that we have created our material you will notice that a number of options have appeared beneath if you have the Shader editor viewport open you will also see the same options in a box or node called principle bsdf you can either work directly within the options on the material tab or via the Shader editor generally the materials tab options are fine for quick coloring but the Shader editor is better for developing complex materials let's start by changing the color settings for our material by left clicking on the base color selector this will bring up a color wheel pop-up if you move your mouse cursor away from the color wheel it will automatically close the pop-up there are a number of ways to generate colors using the color wheel you can select a color by single left clicking or left clicking and dragging within the color wheel itself to choose the colors hue the light and dark for the color can be controlled by single left clicking or left clicking and dragging on the value bar to the side of the color wheel you might want to spend a little time practicing mixing various colors before moving on by left clicking on the tabs RGB HSV and hex you can mix colors manually typing in certain numbers and codes there is even an eyedropper for adopting or sampling existing colors in your scene now we're going to add other materials to our model however there are two things to consider before continuing is our model made up of a single part or is it made up of many separate parts if our model has multiple components in the outliner then to color the other parts we will need to repeat the process we have just covered selecting each part creating a material and changing the color of that material on the other hand if our model is made up of a single part then we'll have to adopt a different approach ensuring that our model is currently selected place the mouse cursor somewhere in the 3D viewport and hit the tab key on your keyboard to enter edit mode we can also achieve this by left clicking on the drop down menu here and choosing edit mode if you can't see this tool palette then hit the T key on your keyboard using the select box tool whilst in edit mode choose the faces you wish to add new color to in this particular case I'm going to give my character blue trousers in the material properties tab we are going to add a new material within an additional slot you can add as many slots As You Wish as your model becomes more complex now we have created a new slot for our material but it currently doesn't have a material allocated to it also we haven't assigned that slot to any part of our model so let's start by creating a new material to fill the new selected slot left click on new and follow the same instructions as before I will choose blue for my color you can also fill the slot by selecting previously made existing materials instead of creating a new one and this can be done by left-clicking on the drop down here and selecting an existing material this can be very useful for keeping things consistent across multiple models within the same blender file if we tweak the settings for a single instance of this material the same material on all other models will instantly change also if we want to create a variant of a color we can duplicate it by clicking on this icon here now that we have allocated a material for this slot it's time to assign our new material to the selected part of our model now our blender model being in edit mode has a number of faces currently selected if we click on assign the current selection will adopt our new material to fully appreciate these changes take your Mouse's cursor over to the 3D viewport and hit tab to come out of edit mode finish the coloring of this model we can simply repeat this process until all colors are in place [Music] don't forget if you want to create a variant of a color simply choose the initial color from this drop down and then duplicate it here you can now tweak your duplicated color there are many other things we can do within the materials tab for instance we can change our materials roughness and glossiness by left clicking and dragging the roughness bar over here either to the right or to the left we can do this numerically as well with a single left click and typing in the desired amount as with all numerical values within blender hit enter to commit we can even make our material look metallic by sliding the metallic bar over here do experiment and that is how you color a 3D model using blender congratulations you are now an expert on this topic I hope you enjoyed this blender video tutorial if you have don't forget subscribe like and please do share I'll see you next time foreign

Channel: Blender Bones

Views: 5,490

Keywords: add color, blender 3.0, beginner tutorial, colorize models, How to Add Color in Blender, 3d modelling, 3d, How to Make Materials in Blender

Id: b6xC4VhWV_c

Length: 8min 24sec (504 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 01 2023