Since 2.63 was released, I've been having a play with Blender again. Did a tutorial, made some stuff, and now want to get down and dirty with Blender's new Cycles materials. This is assuming:

1- Blender Internal materials are specific to Blender Internal... Cycles uses something else
2- When you load a scene originally material-ed for BI and try to convert to Cycles, you'll see "Use Nodes" in the material editor head

So, I'm assuming that Cycles materials are significantly different to what went before. Cycles, at this point, doesn't 'do hair' or SSS, apparently. This is still in its infancy, I get the impression. But overall, there's some amazing stuff you can do with it, already.

A few caveats: whilst Cycles can take advantage of your GPU, CUDA is not CUDA. My laptop has a Geforce GT 230M. Apparently the hardware in this GPU cannot handle the requirements of 2.63 Cycles. You can download builds that will work for older GPUs, but the feature set will be lacking certain things. So, unfortunately for my poor laptop, I cannot use Cycles to do renders. I can set stuff up, however.

Anyway, the point of this thread is to explore Cycles materials a bit.

When you go to materials, add a new material, it defaults to Diffuse BSDF. The node set for Diffuse is pretty simple. You'll always have your Material Output, and then connected to the Surface channel is the Diffuse BSDF node, with only Color and Roughness as input channels. There is a Glass BSDF material, which has two additional channels:

• Distribution: which defaults to Beckmann and
• IOR: which defaults to 1.45

Which gives you this as a result:

Already I'm really liking this renderer and material set!

More to follow later...

Monterey/Mint21.x/Win10 - Blender3.x - PP11.3(cm) - Musescore3.6.2

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