    Adding a Material/understanding the basic material properties
    by Lee a.k.a NEO

    This tutorial will teach you how to add a material to an object, understanding the basic material properties and basic rendering. To fully understand this tutorial
    you should have a basic understanding on adding objects and using basic Blender functions, but I will explain these as fully as I can in this tutorial.
    If you haven't read Night's 4 tutorials on how to make a box and do not know the above, I suggest you read it as this tutorial follows from it.

    OK onto the tutorial. First start Blender and you should see a plane in the middle of your scene, unless you have saved your user defaults.
    If it is there, select it with the right mouse button and it should highlight pink. Then press the delete button and left click on 'Delete Selected'.

    When this is done we should have a nice clean scene with a camera.

    What we are going to do now is demonstrate adding a material onto a sphere, and then we will play around with the properties of the materials
    that can change its look. So the first thing to do is add a sphere. Before we do though, left click, in the 3D window, the top window, where you want the
    sphere to appear when its created, if its already in the middle of the grid leave like that, if its not, just left click until you are happy with its
    position. Now to creating the sphere.

    (1) Place your mouse pointer somewhere in the top window where the 3d scene is (3D Window).
    (2) Press the 'Space Bar', doing this will make a menu appear, you use this to add objects, as we are doing, as well as many other tasks.
    (3) From this menu using it like the 'Microsoft Windows' start menu, place the mouse on 'Add' then move to the right and left click on 'Mesh'
    and then in the menu that appears in its place left click on 'UV sphere'. Like this

    Next you will see a little box pop up where your mouse pointer is. This box is where you put how smooth you want the sphere, how many vertices
    going horizontal and vertical. Left click on OK for both the boxes that pop up 1 after the other, whats there is fine for what we need.
    After you click OK on the second box a sphere should appear where your '3D cursor' is, the little crosshair type marker. This should be in the middle
    of the scene. If your sphere does not appear in the middle of the grid, simply select it like with the plane so it turns pink, then press the letter
    'G' and move you mouse to move the shape. After doing this your scene should look like this with a camera looking to the sphere, which is in the middle
    of the scene.

    Next is to light the scene so that when we render it we can see the sphere. Once again move your mouse pointer up to the 3D window and press
    'Space Bar'. On the left Add should be highlighted and on the right about 2 thirds down should be the word 'Lamp'. Left click on this
    and the lamp should appear where the 3d cursor is. You can notice a lamp as it is a small circle shape yellow when not selected, pink when selected,
    and has a dotted line either above or below it, pointing to the middle horizon of the grid. Add the first as we just did and then move the 3D cursor
    by left clicking in the 3D window which will make it appear where you clicked, and add 2 more near the camera. Now by selecting and moving (G),
    move one at a time, each lamp to where I have put them, you don't need to have them exact, but having them like this will show the effects of the
    light on the material much better.

    Now we are going to put a material onto the sphere we just created, which is a fairly simple step. If your sphere is not selected already select
    it (Right Click) to make it pink and then down the bottom, the bottom window that is, you should see a top header with a whole bunch of buttons next to each other with
    little pictures on them. One of these little buttons has a red ball on it, left click on it and you should see the window change, to be more exact it will appear empty.
    It doesn't look like much but as I found when I first got Blender, many things are hidden. The trick here is that adding a material as much like adding an object.
    If you look on the header of the bottom window you will see a little button that has a white horizontal line on it. This is where we select a material or
    add a new one.

    So go to this button, and left click on it and hold the left mouse button down. You should see a little pop up menu appear. At the moment it will
    just have 'Add New', but all the other materials you have created will be here if you wanted to give it a material you have already made. So once 'Add New'
    is highlighted let go of the left mouse button and suddenly the whole window will be filled with buttons and sliders.

    Now don't be freaked out by all
    of these. They are much simpler then they look, once you work out what they are all for it's easy. Also many of these you don't need to use on one material. In this tutorial
    you will learn about the basic properties on the left side of the material window.

    Now comes the fun part where you get to test out what these buttons do and how they effect what the object's material looks like. Making the actual object is only half
    of making a complete Computer Generated (CG) object, giving it a proper material is just as important. With the materials in Blender you can make plastic looking surface
    into a metal and then glass in just a few buttons pressed and a few sliders pushed. Well let's start by going from the left side and in a later tutorial you will learn
    more about the more advanced properties.
    I will only go over the important buttons, the more advanced buttons I will save for a more advanced tutorial when you have become a bit more experienced with
    Blender.

    In the above picture of the 'Material Properties', you can see the default settings. When you add a new material this is what you will see.
    We will first start by having a look how to change the color from the grey default color to another. If you look to the top left, next to the preview of
    the material, you will see 3 sliders with the title 'R', 'G', 'B'. Making these more to the right by holding the left mouse button and dragging will give it
    more of that color, and moving it to the left will give it less. So give it a try now on any or all of the 3 sliders, if you look at the preview of the material
    you will see it change color, all the sliders to the left will make black, and all to the right will make a white color.

    Now before we go any further we should learn how to render what we have done, I will not tell you about all the buttons, you can read the render tutorial
    to learn more about it, but we don't need to do anything to get a simple render just to see what we have done.
    Heres an example.

    What I have done is put the 'G' green and the 'R' red sliders all the way to the left and the 'B' blue slider all the way to the right, giving a
    complete blue color to my sphere, like this.

    Now you should check what your camera is looking at to make sure that when you render you can see the sphere.
    Do this by pressing 'Zero' on the numpad (Make sure Num Lock is on) and you will now be able to see what the camera sees. You will see two white
    boxes as well, this shows what shape it will render, when you read the rendering tutorial you will find that you can make it render as a square etc.
    The most outside white box is the edge of the render boarder. Make sure that the sphere is inside that box. It should look like this.

    Theres one more thing we need to do before we render it. We need to make the sphere smooth so that it looks very round like a real ball. Not block like it is now.
    In the same row of buttons with the pictures on, you should see a button with a black square with yellow dots at the corners. Click on this button, don't worry about
    all the buttons there but click once on the button highlighted in this picture, 'Set Smooth'.

    Now we can render our nice blue sphere. Just press 'F12' and watch the magic happen. You should see a window pop up and the picture of a blue sphere on a black background.
    Like so. To go back to the normal Blender screen press 'F11"

    If you like you can try a couple of other colors and render them, when you are ready you can read about the other properties you will learn in this tutorial.

    The next property we will look at is the specular. It's the slider called 'Spec' and is right next to the preview of the material and under the 'RGB'. This will do
    exactly as it says, will make it more or less specular. Once again we will try this out on the sphere. I will show you 2 pictures, the first with a small amount
    of specular and the second with full specular which will show you how it effects the material.

    First here is the menu, just look at spec, thats all that has changed. The picture under it is the render.

    Low Spec

    High Spec

    The next down is 'Hard'. It is linked to specularity as it makes the specularity harder or softer, left for the softest, right for the hardest.
    Once again I am using the default properties and only moving the hardness.

    Low Hard

    High Hard

    I'm sure that by now you know how these work now, for the other basic properties I will give you a write up on each and will leave it to you
    to see how each reacts.

    Basic Sliders

    Add: Sets how much the material glows (Glow Factor)

    Ref: Sets the amount of light is reflected off the material (Makes the material lighter or darker, good for getting a very white color)

    Alpha: Sets the coverage of the material, the less the number, the more transparent the material becomes, use with 'Z Tranp' pressed down
    	 to make other objects appear behind. (eg. Glass)

    Emit: Sets how much light the material gives out, if there is no light in the scene and you have it emitting light you will still see it.
    	 (eg. Lava)

    Basic Buttons

    Traceable: Makes material show for shadow (Recommended on)

    Shadow: Makes object with material give a shadow (Recommended on)

    Shadeless Makes the material cartoonish, good for making something look hand drawn. (only on if you want to make something look like a cartoon)

    Wire Makes the material only draw the edges and not the faces (Not a really important feature, you may need it if you wanted to do a cage etc.)

    Z Transp Makes the object see-through, once you press it take the 'Alpha' slider down (Very handy, good for things like glass, water, hologram etc)

    Only Shadow The object with this material does not appear but still makes a shadow. (only use things to do with shadows when you have read the
    		   lamp tutorial that will be coming soon)

    Well I hope that this tutorial helps you to understand Blenders material properties. The other thing you should learn next is about textures. They can
    make a material look very real. For a more experienced Blender user, for every material it has at least 2 textures, giving amazing results.
    I will have a tutorial up for this very soon, I'm probably doing it as your reading this, so check back and I should have that in the next few days.