How do you add more than one material to a mesh?
I have tried adding two materials to the object, and then assigning one of the materials to a vertex-group, but I could not find a place to assign it.
I am making a striped bouncy ball that I want to deform, so adding a different material by separating the mesh into different objects would not be ideal.
You need to be in edit mode.
Click the "+" icon on the right side of "material" shown in the image below to create a new material.
Let's give the new material a green color.
Click the Assign button in the Materials tab under the list of materials:
(for older versions)
And you're done!
Make sure you have you have more than one material slot if you want to assign a single material to only a selection of faces. If only one material slot exists it will automatically be assigned to all faces of a mesh, regardless of selection.
You can switch between different shaders using a UV mapped image, if you're using cycles. You accomplish this by creating a black and white image mask and using it as the factor for a mix shader.
This has some unique benefits:
You can create soft transitions between shaders
You can have multiple shaders in any shapes/areas on a single face, or across edge and face boundaries
You don't have to create extra geometry to apply your additional shaders to
Here's what it looks like, notice that this cube only has 6 faces:
And, here's the node setup you use:
You can also chain multiple mix shaders together to further mask areas defined by your first mask. If I replaced the orange diffuse shader in my node tree above with a mix shader of white gloss and green diffuse, using another mask as a factor, I could separate the orange area shown above into two other materials. You can keep chaining mix shaders as far as you like.
I was confused because I didn't understand there were two lists of material... I created materials in the drop-down list:
Then I selected the material here, the faces and clicked on Assign. It didn't work, I had all my faces using the same material!
But I finally understood you actually assign materials added to the list above:
You have to click the + button on the right, and you can either create a new material or select an existing one in the drop-down. Then you can select a material in this list to assign to the selected faces.
Also note that if you select a material in this list, then click Select, it will show (select) all the faces using this material.
If you already have your mesh separated and applied different shaders to each, simply rejoing (Ctrl+J. Then Tab into edit-mode and press Ctrl+V>remove doubles.
