In today’s video, we’re going to go through the basics of how to start adding materials to your objects in Blender!

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So when you first start modeling an object inside of blender, it’s probably going to look like it’s shaded in shades of gray. For example, when you take a look at this simple cube, it’s just…gray. Nothing special about the color that’s in here right now. This is because we haven’t assigned a color to the object yet, so it’s showing the default material.

If you look at the tabs over here on the right hand side of the page, you’ll notice that when we select an object, we get a little tab called “material properties.” This is where you can manage the materials that have been applied to different objects in your model. The first thing to note is that each object in object mode can have materials, OR you can apply materials to individual faces by going into edit mode.

To start off, we need to add a material. To do this, click the “new material” button. This will pop up a brand new material with a whole bunch of settings. Don’t get worried about this now, we’ll go through what they do in the future, but in general, these are going to control different aspects of the way your material looks inside of your model. Notice that if we add this material to the cube on the left hand side, then go down and adjust the color, the color of your cube in your model will change…ASSUMING YOU’RE IN MATERIAL PREVIEW OR RENDERED MODE. You won’t see materials if you’re in wireframe or shaded mode.

For now, let’s focus on material preview mode – we can talk more about rendered mode in a bit. So right now, we have a single color applied to our whole box. Let’s go ahead and name that material over here on the right. Now, click on your cylinder. Notice that there is nothing inside of your cylinder. This is because you haven’t associated any textures with your cylinder.

Now, we could either add in a new color, or if you click on the sphere on the left, you could also apply a material that’s already in the model. Notice there’s a list of all the materials currently contained in your model. One thing about this though, is that right now, I don’t necessarily want to make my whole cylinder pink. Instead, what if I wanted to make part of it one color, and another part another?

Let’s remove the pink material by clicking the little X, and instead, select our cylinder and hit Tab to go into edit mode. Now, select the top of your cylinder. Go over into your material properties tab, find the pink color material, and click the button for assign. Notice that this pink material is still applied to your entire cylinder.

However…let’s go add a second material to our list by clicking the little plus key. Make it whatever color you’d like. Now select all the faces below the lid on your cylinder (you may have to go into wireframe mode). Then, assign the different materials to different faces in your cylinder by selecting them, selecting a material, and selecting the “assign” button. You’ll likely use this method a lot to apply materials to different faces. Now let’s talk a bit about some of the other settings on this list – most of these are going to affect the way your object looks when it’s rendered, rather than when it’s in material preview mode.

Specifically, I’m going to talk about the way this looks in Eevee – Blender’s real-time rendering engine.