Materials Part 1: Multi/Sub-Object Materials

The goal for this tutorial series is to apply blue glass and a white text logo to the Bawls bottle using only one material slot.

In Part 1 we are going to discuss how to set up a Multi/Sub-Object Material for the bottle. To start with all I have is my bottle with a standard material applied labeled BlueGlass. Labeling materials is a great habit to get into and is extremely important for this exercise.

The first thing we need to do is setup the Multi/Sub-Object material. You can think of this like a container which lets us hold several materials in just one slot. Click on the Standard button and choose Multi/Sub-Object. Choose "Keep old material as sub-material" when the window pops up.

For this exercise we are only going to need two slots, so I am going to click the "Set Number" box and change the Number of Materials setting to 2.

At this point it becomes important to understand what our material now consists of. Clicking the button highlighted in yellow brings up the Material/Map Navigator. This is a visual representation of your material. If you study the hierarchy you will see that the root is a Multi/Sub-Object material. It has two children; 1 is our BlueGlass material and 2 is still standard gray.

Let's navigate to our gray material now so we can give it a color and a name. You can do this one of three ways. The easiest way is to click on the gray material in the Material/Map Navigator. Another way would be to travel back to the root using the Go to Parent button, then click on the gray material. Still another way is to click the Go Forward to Sibling button, which will move us around the hierarchy without moving us up or down a level. Try all of these to get familiar with them.

Once you are in the gray material, give it a unique Diffuse color and name it BawlsLogo. This material will be used to designate which polygons on our mesh will receive the logo material when we are finished.