In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:
- Building the reptile skin shaders in Blender Internal
- Building the eyes' shaders in Blender Internal
- Building the armor shaders in Blender Internal
In this chapter we'll see how to set up the materials for the Gidiosaurus and the Armor in the Blender Render engine; in fact, although not exactly of the same quality as in Cycles, it is also possible to obtain quite similar shader results in Blender Internal:
Comparison of the Gidiosaurus character rendered in Cycles (left) and Blender Internal (right)
If you are wondering why we should re-do in the Blender Render engine, which is quite old and no longer developed and/or supported, the same thing we have already done in Cycles, there are several possible reasons: for example, no doubt Cycles is superior in quality but, compared with the scanline BI, its rendering is (and, being a path-tracer, always will be) slower; even with the aid of a render-farm, rendering times are still a money issue in the production of animations.
The previous screenshot shows, for comparison, only the top parts of two full shot renderings of the Gidiosaurus character: the Cycles rendering to the left took around 1 hour and 20 minutes (1920 × 1080 resolution CPU rendering with Intel Core 2 Duo T6670 2.20 GHz and 4 GB of RAM, in Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit); the Blender Internal rendering to the right took only 26 minutes.
One other reason is that Cycles' normals baking capabilities are still not as good as in Blender Internal (at the moment, it bakes only the real geometry, contrary to Blender Internal, which can also bake the bump output of textures to normal maps), or that it's not as flexible for Non-Photorealistic Rendering (NPR) as the Blender Render engine.
Just a quick note: normally, materials under the Blender Render engine are created directly in the slots inside the Material window, often switching to the Texture window and back; in the following screenshot, you can see the Rendered preview of a generic Red mono material assigned to a UV Sphere:
A generic "mono" Blender Internal material
But, it's also possible to use node materials in Blender Internal, created and connected inside the Node Editor window; basically, let's say that two or more materials can be mixed through nodes to obtain more advanced results. In the following screenshot, for example, the mono Red material is mixed with a mono Green material through the output of a Voronoi texture connected to the Fac input socket of a MixRGB node:
Two mono materials mixed in the Node Editor window
This is the way we are going to create the Blender Internal shaders.