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Beginner

Transparency

Transparency and light refraction within a transparent material are key parameters in order to get a realistic rendering of a material like solid glass. This tutorial doesn't help with getting caustic spots, which is beyond the reach of the actual version of Blender (v2.36) without using an external renderer like Yafray.

Reflections

In the past, Blender used EnvMaps (environmental maps) in order to simulate the reflectiveness of objects. But this way was quite difficult, needing the use of Empties (null objects) and layers when a simple reflecting plane was needed. Fortunately, including Raytracing into the renderer eased the whole process and helped to achieve a greater realism.

Material Indice

This short tutorial aims at showing you how to give many different materials to the same mesh (up to 16 different indice)

UV Mapping and Texturing

In this tutorial you will learn how to make a UV map of an object you wish to texture using Blender's 'seams' functionality. By learning how to do this correctly you can apply effective detailed textures to almost any object, ushering your work into a new level of complexity and flexibility.

Note: You will need blender v2.34 (or greater), and an image editing program like Gimp or Photoshop to attempt this tutorial.

UV Mapping

This tutorial was written for 1.8, but everything still works the same in 2.0.

Well, there might have been some confusion about the UV texturing, since Ton suggested to me today, that I should write a UV texturing tutorial :o) Here it is!

Making a Reflection

If you getting started in Blender you can probally think of a scene or two where you'd like to have reflective surfaces. As of Blender 2.32 this became very easy using the new builtin Raytracer. The raytracer gives us the tools to create realistic looking reflections, with a few simple steps.

Intermediate

The Unofficial Texturing Tutorial

I do not use UV mapping for very many of my textures. I like the control of the method I have and have gotten extremely fast at it.

Using Texture Stencils

A stencil is one of the most useful tips when you want to finely control the way the shader changes from one texture to another, on the same object, and with the use of a single material index.

Advanced

Blender and Normal Maps

Bump mapping is a well known but old technique for faking 3d reliefs. The
relief information is stored in a gray-scale image. But a new and very
popular method in the 3D game industry offers to store the relief information
in a RGB image, increasing the precision and, obviously, the realism of fake
reliefs on your 3D models: Normal mapping. This short tutorial is about showing you how to build your own Normal maps without expensive tools, and of course how to use them.