Bits of Blender #60 - Normals and Nodes

A quick tip on normals and material nodes.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• normals
• nodes
• blender
• nyquist
• tutorial

[c0no]

Excuse me, im learning blender (i've been learning for a week now) and im asking if i learn with your videos, as old as they are, will they help me? I can see you used the old version (2.4) in which the interface is different. Will that be much problem?

Thanks in advance!

[bitsofblender]

@c0no 2.5 has a nicer UI and is better organized but the basics concepts of how you work (and how it works) are the same. Anything you can do in 2.4x you can do in 2.5x but some features may be moved to a different spot. For this video I stepped back to 2.49 because it worked, the version of 2.5x that was out was in beta did not function properly in this area for what I wanted to show.

[veggiet2009]

Thanks for the tips! It's been ages since I've used 2.49, but would selecting 'view' in widget view options do the same thing as you're trying to achieve? Anyway, when are you guys coming back? I miss hearing richard's "colour commentary" :D

[bitsofblender]

@veggiet2009 We've been pretty busy lately, but we'll be back! Regarding your first question, you are right, I should have shown the View option of the widget as well as then the arrows are always normal to the view. What I was going for in this Bit was to teach the idea of normals, how they are visually represented, and how you can manipulate them via nodes. Hopefully by the end the viewer is able to predict what happens when they translate the normals with the Mapping node.

[jawayetti]

FWIW, I think you meant to say, "RGB blends into YUV." RGB does not blend into CMYK. CMYK (used notably in inkjet printers) is an inferior subset of Pantone, which is inferior to RGB.

Nice tutorial. I knew you could rotate normals, but I could never think of an application!

Nodes are the future.

[bitsofblender]

@jawayetti Thanks for the kind comments. I agree, nodes are great. What I meant to say was "CMY", not "CMYK", to describe the blending you can see between the RGB values (ie GB=C, RB=M, RG=Y). With (ancient) background in print, saying "CMY" made "K" automatically slip out with it. :-) On a printing press for typical 4-color work, you use the subtractive primaries "CMY" but because inks don't blend perfectly to black, you in black ink (pulling out a portion of the CMY mix).

[norvman]

Hummm very interesting concepts Normals and Nodes... Thanks for this...

[deltaray3]

"You win another day of using Blender in this house" - Hahaha

[Cod6Media]

Hey bitsofblender, these are really nice video tutorials. Wish you had one on my problem tat i have atm. But good work, you gonna make some more soon?

[SuperGamer87]

Thank you! This was helpful!

[LevitskiSRGE]

Is'n it usually used to make re-lightning in post compositing? I never tried it, but I'm assuming. And yes, it was nice try to explain this not trivial part of 3d math =)

[jawayetti]

@bitsofblender I didn't know CMY had a direct mapping to RGB. It's not a format I use as I've been ingrained with the YUV matrix from video work. Good to know. And I learned something new about print, too! ;-)