TGJ2O

Materials

We are now going to explore how to attach materials and textures to our model. The important thing to remember in Blender is EACH OBJECT SELECTED IN OBJECT MODE HAS ITS OWN MATERIALS. You can use settings from one object on another one, but in the end the cockpit will have it's own materials as will the disc. The UFO body is going to be a metallic grey except for a strip of colour around it's ring.

Let's change the shading to SMOOTH. Right click the Disc and choose Shade>Smooth

Next let's go into EDIT MODE. We're going to be in Surface select (instead of vertex or edge select).

Step 1 - Putting a grey metal on the saucer disc.

Choose all of the surfaces of the saucer disk by pressing A.

Open the materials menu at the far right side of your screen and press NEW.

Rename this new material to Saucer.disc and press enter.

We're going to enter Principled BDSF values that make the ship body look like old grey metal (here's a list of what all those "Surface" bells and whistles mean (link)

For steel we're going to use the following settings (at right):

Metallic: Slide it all the way to 1.0

Roughness 0.5

IOR: 2.5

Alpha: 1

Click on the white box next to the word Base Color and choose it to be a medium grey. If you REALLY want to nerd out you can follow this tutorial (maybe?) and get a pitted metal.

Your preview should look a lot like metal when you're done

In order to have the material visible you'll need to enter either Material Preview (Z on the keyboard) or Rendered Preview (which you tend to want to avoid as complex textures can lag your viewscreen in this mode).

Step 2 - Ring Section of the saucer

Go to top-view mode (7 on the keypad). Still in EDIT MODE/Surface choose FACES (3 - see the icon below) and select choose your circle select tool (C), change the size of the brush you are using to tailor to your zoom level (middle scroll wheel lets you roll bigger/smaller brush) and start 'painting the middle ring of the top surface. If you make a mistake - no worries - you can DESELECT any mistakes you make by pressing SHIFT and painting the surfaces you want deselected (or press down the middle mouse wheel and paint). Once you're happy with the selection press ENTER.

We're going to colour this ring with a new colour (but same type of material). Click on the + on the right side of the materials panel. Make a new material called Saucer.ring. Notice how there are 2 material slots in this object now?

We're going to choose a kind of light tan color. Use all the same other settings for this color (e.g. metallic 1.0, roughness 0.5 etc...). Click on base color and choose something tan-ish.

Nothing will be applied uniless you click on the ASSIGN button to get the colour to "stick" to the ring now. It will only be visible if you're in EDIT mode and you've selected the faces.

Press Alt+A (or just click off the object in space) and see what it looks like. Switch to Z-rendered mode if you want. Switch back to Z->SOLID to keep working.

Step 3 - Cockpit

Go back out to the OBJECT MODE.

Smooth Shade the cockpit (remember, right click it and choose smooth shade)

Head back into EDIT MODE. We're going to colour the cockpit the same metallic grey, and edit faces on the cockpit to add a window.

Use the dropdown menu (picture below left) and choose Saucer.disc It will load the same color used for the dark grey disc. into the cockpit. However, we want to control it a bit better. So we're going to make a copy of the material.
Click on the button that duplicates/creates new material based on the last one. You'll now have a material called Saucer.disc.001.
Rename that to cockpit.black. Select all of the faces (A) and ASSIGN the colour to the faces (under the material there's a button called ASSIGN).
Deselect all the faces now and create a new material. (the + at the top right
Use the material settings for glass. Select a region of faces (4 'panes'). After tweaking the glass material ASSIGN the colour to the 4 selected faces.

https://blenderartists.org/t/realistic-glass-in-eevee/1149937

Choose the saucer.disc material

Create a copy of that material

Creating the new material slot for the glass

Change the Surface type to GLASS BSSF
roughness = 0
IOR to 0.95
BlendMode to AlphaHashed
Shadows to Opaque
Refraction Depth to 0.1m

Now select the "window panes" in the front by pressing C, then brush the boxes.

Finally hit APPLY to make the glass attach to those panes.

Tab back out to object mode and look at your work

Save your work!

This is what the materials applied to the saucer disc and cockpit look like

Step 4 - Render

We are going to do a quick render to see what it's going to look like.

Hit 0 on the keypad to view what the camera will view. If you haven't changed anything this is what it will look like (below).

Select the camera (it's the rectangular box you're "looking through". It should be orange now that it's selected (see below). Now on the right side, near where you pressed the materials button there is a green movie-camera looking icon. Click on it. then on the right menu, next to where it says camera, click on the 3 dots/3lines (menu). Choose a RED camera of any kind.

We will now reposition your ship so it isn't super-close. To do so, simply hit G (for move), and that will allow you to move the camera. HOWEVER, the easiest thing to do now is to click the middle mouse button (mouse wheel) and pull down on your mouse. That will pull away directly from the ship

Now let's render the image..

Press F12 and then IMAGE>SAVE AS and save a copy of your picture into your folder.

Give the file the appropriate name (probably saucer1.png). BY DEFAULT THE COMPRESSION TYPE IS PNG.

It still looks pretty fake right? There are MANY things we can do to start adding texture and lighting to make our saucers more "realistic" but still they're.....you know.....flying saucers so we won't expect much.

To get back to our working view, just click on the leftmost tab called LAYOUT

Now on to adding "flair" to our UFO and learn about "lathing"

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