Can i create multiple materials for single face

Question

Can I create multiple materials for a single face of the thing like circle?

Creating some pattern like square or other circle boxes on the circle to apply different materials on them.

Or can we create a simple circle with sub meshes (if that's the right with terminology), in a similar way as said for creating a pattern of boxes(square/circles) so that these squares or circles are different meshes so that they can be colored or textured differently?

Complete noob at model making, first question. Thank you.

Answer 1

While you can't directly apply multiple materials to a single face, you can use a texture map to control how two different materials appear on a face.

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Blender Render:

Make sure your object has a material.

Click the Use Nodes button.

Drag out a new panel.

Change the panel to the Node Editor.

Add a MixRGB node...

...and plug it in like so.

Duplicate the Material node and plug it in to the MixRGB node. Make sure to assign both nodes their own materials.

Customise both materials to your liking. Notice that dragging the MixRGB slider left or right changes which Material node the final material uses. 0 corresponds to the top node, and 1 corresponds to the bottom node.

Create a new texture in the data textures list.

Customise the texture to your liking, or import a UV map for more control.

Add a Texture node from Add --> Inputs --> Texture, and plug in the Value output into the MixRGB node. Notice that the black parts of the texture correspond to the top Material (value 0) and the white parts correspond to the bottom node (value 1).

Voilà! Rendering an image shows that it mixes the materials regardless of the faces!

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The same concept can be applied to Cycles; just replace the Material nodes with a shader node tree each.

Answer 2

You can't assign two materials on one face obviously. How would you determine the boundaries? What you can is create mask (black and white image) and use it as factor for blending two materials.

Answer 3

You could give the material a texture (and use a specific image editor like GIMP to make a nice texture) after giving it a material. You may or may not need to UV unwrap the object so that the texture looks proper on the model however. This is what the texture panel would look like:

You could also create the actual geometry that you are trying to achieve in Edit Mode. While in Edit Mode, you can use the assign button in the Materials Tab to set a particular material to the faces you have selected. Something like this:

Which way to go can depend very heavily on what you are trying to achieve. If you are trying to make a flat plane with a pattern, use a texture so that you do not unnecessarily increase the vertex count (taking longer to render). If you have a tree with leaves that are going to be just one color, then go with the different materials.