6 Cycles Node Tricks that Make Your Blender Life Easier

2020-11-23 · By Richard

We've collaborated with Mike again to celebrate Nodevember this year :) He has been playing around with the Cycles material nodes, and has a bunch of clever tricks prepared for you. You might already know some of these, but they will advance in complexity as we move along. I was especially impressed when I saw how he created the Lego brick animation, the last trick of the tutorial.

6 Tricks

1. Randomizing Color (simple version)

Blender Cycles Nodes - Randomizing Color

This is a very basic technique. It allows you to give a large group of objects (sharing the same material) different colors. Powered by the Random value of the Object Node.

2. More than One Random Number Per Object

Blender Cycles Nodes - Multiple Random Numbers Per Object

If you're looking for advanced randomization, you will need more than one random number. This is not possible by using multiple random nodes. Instead, you can use a trick that generates different random values from a single number with the modulo math operator.

3. Randomizing Texture Coordinates

Blender Cycles Nodes - Randomizing Texture Coordinates

To prevent the classic CG texture look, randomize your texture coordinates. Instead of colors, plug random numbers into the texture nodes.

4. Using Object Color

Blender Cycles Nodes - Using Object Color

Using the Object Color property and getting it into the material node tree. This allows you to use the same material for lots of objects, but customize values with the object Color.

5. Animating Materials using Object Color

Blender Cycles Nodes - Animating Materials using Object Color

This builds on the next trick, but includes keyframes to animate material values outside of the actual material data. Quite powerful.

6. Pixel Art with One Pixel per Object

Blender Cycles Nodes - Lego Bricks Pixel Art

This one is really fun, it's a cheap way to achieve complex animation. All you need to drive the animation is an animated sprite. Low res in this case, because each pixel corresponds to one Lego brick.

Demo

And finally, the video where Mike goes through these six tricks one by one.

Download

If you want to play around with the six .blend files Mike created during this tutorial, you can download them here: 6TricksObjectInfo.zip

If you want to see more of Mike's tutorials, check out his YouTube channel!