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Learning — Blender Shaders & Nodes

A short list. Not "everything that exists" — just what's worth your time.

Official

  • Blender Manual — Shading section (docs.blender.org). Dry but authoritative. Especially the Nodes and Fields articles.
  • Blender Manual — Geometry Nodes. Read Fields, Domains, and Simulation Zones before watching any tutorial. The tutorials assume these concepts.

Courses and videos

  • Blender Guru — "The Nodevember" series / Procedural material videos. Andrew Price's earlier material-focused videos (donut aside) are still the best intro for why you combine noise + ColorRamp + math.
  • Default Cube (CGMatter) — weird, fast, deep. Especially good for odd procedural tricks and math-heavy solutions. Expect to pause a lot.
  • Erindale — the Geometry Nodes channel. Long-form, explains fields properly. His Procedural Worlds and Scatter System series are templates for building real production systems.
  • Bad Normals — stylized shading and NPR (non-photorealistic rendering) with Blender nodes. Exceptional for cel-shading and toon edge logic.
  • Johnny Matthews / Higgsas — Geometry Nodes add-ons with open source code; reading them teaches node-graph architecture.

Books / long reads

  • "The PBR Guide" by Allegorithmic (free PDF). Not Blender-specific; it explains the why of Principled BSDF inputs. Read before you do any PBR material work anywhere.
  • "Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation" (Pharr, Jakob, Humphreys) — free online at pbrt.org. Overkill if you just want to make pretty pictures; required reading if you want to understand why BSDFs are structured the way they are.

OSL

  • Open Shading Language — Language Specification (github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/OpenShadingLanguage). The spec is short. Skim it; it's less than a textbook.
  • Larry Gritz's OSL introductory slides (various SIGGRAPH years) — the origin story and design principles from OSL's creator.

Procedural content generation

  • "The Book of Shaders" (thebookofshaders.com) — browser-based shader lessons by Patricio Gonzalez Vivo and Jen Lowe. Teaches GLSL, but everything transfers 1:1 to Blender nodes (noise, SDFs, domain warping, cellular patterns).
  • Inigo Quilez's articles (iquilezles.org). SDFs, noise functions, domain warping, raymarching. Foundational. Much of it implemented as nodes in examples.md of this wiki.

Asset sources (for reference, not for "done for you")

  • Poly Haven — CC0 HDRIs, textures, and models. Study their PBR texture sets: open the roughness/normal/displacement maps in an image editor to see what "real" PBR maps look like before assuming your procedural ones are right.
  • ambientCG — another CC0 PBR source. Same use: study and compare.

Communities

  • Blender Artists forum (blenderartists.org). Old-school forum, but "Technical Support" and "Support" sections are where experts actually answer hard questions.
  • r/blender — help threads are fine for beginner questions; the Friday "weekend challenge" is a great forcing function for practice.
  • Blender Stack Exchange (blender.stackexchange.com). The top-rated answers are usually high quality. Search before asking.
  • Right-Click Select (blender.community/c/rightclickselect) — feature request + community-built nodes/scripts.

Practice structure

If you only have 30 minutes a day: 1. Week 1–2: rebuild every material from examples.md of this wiki. By hand. No copy-paste. 2. Week 3–4: one material a day from a photo reference (Google "old leather", "weathered concrete", "iridescent insect wing"). Constraint: only procedural, no image textures. 3. Week 5+: a Geometry Nodes project with a user-facing parameter surface — something someone else could use. Ship it to the asset library.

This is an apprenticeship, not a library.