Materials are how you give a Blender object color and surface qualities like shine, roughness or metal. Everything starts with one shader, the Principled BSDF, and once you understand it you can make almost any surface. Here is how to add your first material.
Step 1: Open Material Properties
- Select your object.
- In the Properties editor on the right, click the Material Properties tab (the small sphere icon).
- Click New. Blender adds a material using the Principled BSDF shader.
Step 2: Set the color
Under the material, find Base Color and click the swatch. Pick any color and it applies to the object.
If you do not see the change in your viewport, that is expected. Blender’s default Solid shading ignores materials. Switch to Material Preview using the sphere icons in the top-right of the viewport, and your color appears.
Step 3: Adjust the surface feel
The Principled BSDF does far more than color. The two sliders you will use most:
- Roughness: low values are shiny and reflective, high values are matte. This single slider is the difference between polished plastic and chalk.
- Metallic: set it to 1 for metals like steel or gold, 0 for everything else.
Between Base Color, Roughness and Metallic you can create a huge range of believable surfaces.
Step 4: Multiple materials on one object
You can assign different materials to different faces. In Edit Mode, select the faces, add a second material slot, select it, and click Assign. This is how a single model gets, say, a metal frame and a plastic body.
Where to go next
Once you are comfortable with flat colors, the natural next step is adding an image texture for real surface detail, then lighting and rendering to finish your scene.
Keep going
Materials are one stage of the 3D pipeline. Our Blender Texturing and Animation course covers materials and texturing in depth, and you can start with the free Blender course to learn the fundamentals first.