Adding materials

The first thing we need to do is to go through and just add some basic materials. This will be similar to what we did with our spacecraft model—don't worry about actually creating the materials right now, just create the material slots and assign them to the appropriate parts of the mesh:

The primary material, of course, will be the truck's paint. We'll use Blender Internal materials to create a stylized paint scheme. First, switch to the internal rendering engine:

Since the introduction of Cycles in Blender 2.5, it has become less common to use Blender Internal for anything. However, there were some interesting features built into the Blender Internal engine. For instance, the materials and texturing system could produce some complex and unique patterns. We'll take advantage of that to create a custom paint job for our truck.

Before we continue with the truck, it might help to create a simple object and play around with some textures. In this case, I'll just use a basic...