Blender Shaders & Nodes — 12-Week Practice Schedule¶

20 minutes daily, 5 days a week. Builds on the Blender 12-week schedule; do that first if you're new to Blender.

Week 1 — Shader Editor basics¶

• Day 1: Quickstart
• Day 2: Build a 3-color material (base, mid via ColorRamp, accent via Mix)
• Day 3: Add Image Texture; route via Texture Coordinate (UV vs Generated vs Object)
• Day 4: Roughness map (Non-Color!) controlling roughness
• Day 5: Normal map via Normal Map node; verify orientation

Week 2 — Procedural textures¶

• Day 1: Noise Texture deep-dive; Detail and Distortion params
• Day 2: Voronoi Texture: F1, F2, Distance to Edge — what each does
• Day 3: Wave Texture; combine with noise via Mix
• Day 4: Musgrave / FBM-style — stack with Math nodes for warping
• Day 5: Build a procedural marble or wood; save as node group

Week 3 — Math and masks¶

• Day 1: Math node tour: Multiply, Add, Power, Greater Than, Clamp
• Day 2: ColorRamp as remapper (constant interpolation = threshold)
• Day 3: Geometry > Pointiness (Cycles only) → ColorRamp → Mix as edge wear mask
• Day 4: Object Info > Random for per-object color variation
• Day 5: Vertex paint / Color Attribute → custom mask read in shader

Week 4 — Project: weathered metal¶

• Build the weathered painted metal example end-to-end. Don't read; rebuild from memory after first study.

Week 5 — Geometry Nodes intro¶

• Day 1: Read Tutorial Level 4
• Day 2: Distribute Points on Faces → Instance on Points
• Day 3: Random Value → rotation/scale randomization
• Day 4: Capture Attribute on Point domain
• Day 5: Named Attribute pass-through to shader

Week 6 — Geometry Nodes: a small system¶

• Build the scatter rocks system. Expose density, seed, scale range as group inputs.

Week 7 — Fields and domains¶

• Day 1: Position field; Set Position with noise displacement
• Day 2: Domain conversions (Capture, Evaluate on Domain, Interpolate Domain)
• Day 3: Boolean masking (Capture + Less Than threshold)
• Day 4: Spline-based scattering — Curve to Points, Curve to Mesh
• Day 5: Read Spreadsheet editor; debug a field that's wrong

Week 8 — Project: ivy or vine system¶

• Build a parametric ivy system on any mesh, controlled by vertex paint mask. Ship it as a node group.

Week 9 — Compositor intro¶

• Day 1: Render Layers; route into Composite/Viewer
• Day 2: Color balance (lift/gamma/gain), curves
• Day 3: Vignette via Mask + multiply
• Day 4: Glare; bloom on emissive elements
• Day 5: Cryptomatte for object isolation

Week 10 — Performance and baking¶

• Day 1: Bake material to image (Cycles, Bake type: Combined or Diffuse+Roughness+Normal separately)
• Day 2: Identify expensive nodes; replace with baked equivalents in EEVEE
• Day 3: Texture resolution choices; mipmaps
• Day 4: Light Linking (4.x+) on a complex scene
• Day 5: Profile a scene; reduce render time by 30% or more

Week 11 — OSL (optional, Cycles)¶

• Day 1: Enable OSL; build the stripes shader
• Day 2: Add a custom uniform input
• Day 3: Implement a simple distance field (sphere, box) in OSL
• Day 4: Animate via TIME or input
• Day 5: Decide: do you need OSL for your work, or is the node language enough?

Week 12 — Ship a procedural asset¶

• Pick: a procedural environment, a tileable material library, or a procedural prop generator (e.g. Geometry-Nodes building generator). Ship + thumbnail + parameter doc. Mark as Asset in Blender's Asset Browser.

After Week 12¶

• Asset Library expansion — keep adding well-documented node groups.
• Pick a real shading challenge (NPR / cel shading; iridescence; SSS skin; volumetrics) and dedicate 4 weeks.
• Cross-reference Mental Models #2 (DAGs) — same skills transfer to Unity Shader Graph and Godot VisualShader.