Material

Baking planet texture to equirectangular projection

Blender provides a great possibility for creating procedural textures and materials. In particular, in Blender, we can create interesting procedural textures for planets. However, Blender’s node system is not compatible with third-party renders and game engines, and procedurally generated textures need to be baked into an image.

MatCap based on shader nodes

MatCap is a material with just one texture, but it allows to quickly and conveniently show how a mesh will look with a certain material and in a certain light. When we assign a MatCap by selecting it in the 3D viewport shading options (Shading – Lighting – MatCap), the MatCap is assigned to all objects in the scene at once. However, if we need to selectively assign a MatCap to some meshes, MatCap can be emulated using shader nodes.