Working with materials.

In this post I will discuss how I made my textures.

The first texture was the Glowing green light that is used on the necrons.
I had a good look for glowing effects on you tube.

The following link shows 3 methods to achieve the glowing effect.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QAHIYCYB3o&feature=related


I chose the last one used in the video.

In the material editor I select a new material and set it to architectural and add the limnosity. and select my green colour.This makes the object illuminate light. To create the glow effect (making the black around my area go greenish) I clicked on render set up and on the output lence I added the glare. and draged it to the material editor.
The glare was too much so I reduced it.

I also created the crome from watching this video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ULDU2ULS1g

I select an empty material and set glossiness to 40 and set diffuse colour to dark grey.
The Raytrace is set  to 80 and then selected and Raytrace is chosen.

Also when looking for tutorials to create chains to use in my enviroment i stumbled across this tutorial which showed me a smart way making my metal to look rough with the use of selecting a bump map and applying dent to it. I have not used it yet but i intend to on my enviroment and maybe on my dreadnought.

Finaly the most complex material i made was for the smoke coming out of the exhaust's.
I took guide from this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3regJHtfBU&feature=related)

again starting from standard the glossiness is set to 0 which makes sence, and then for the oppasity a gradient is used.
I set  colour #1 as black and colour #2 a very dark grey, colour #3 is set to a smoke modifier.

Conclusion
The material editor is a very powerful tool. Materials can be given great complexity as you can apply diffrent materials inside your material. For the smoke for example a gradiant was used for is diffuse colour and that gradiant in turn had a smoke effect within it.
The rusty chain had inside it a bump map that used the dent material.
I have understood the basics and how it works but I am still unaware of all it abilities and potential, something that will only come with practice.