Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Every Material Known to Man/Light Effects

Strange Blue Material

A fairly transparent blue Sphere.

Three things are important with this material:

1. Fresnel Transparency (no Raytracing)
2. A Clouds Texture for Displacement, so the sphere has Subdivision Surfaces Level 3 for the render.
3. Lots of Emit with the usual Nor and Z/-/- settings on the Map Input panel for a radial blend.

In fact I've used three textures. So let's have a look a the material settings first:

Material Settings

The Texture Mappings are:

First Texture: Displacement

Second Texture: Ref and Emit

This is not optimized, Spec is too strong, Emit would better have gone to another texture.

Third Texture: Spec and Emit

The Textures:

The Clouds Texture is made pretty much with the Default Values.

The first Blend Texture uses a colorband with a very sharp falloff.

The second Blend Texture uses a normal Sphere Blend, so it's not necessary to show it.