CGCookie - Fundamentals of Shading in Blender 2.7

https://cgcookie.com/courses/fundamentals-of-shading

• Shading for Cycles Shaders control the way light interacts with your model. This is very important because light interaction is what determines whether your object is transparent and glass-like, hard and metallic, shiny like plastic, or translucent like wax. In this course you will first learn how to construct materials for the Cycles physically-based render engine.
• You will see how to navigate and function inside the node editor, mix basic shader components together, as well as construct a practical material using multiple material layers influenced by image textures. These principles will establish the shader foundation you will need to construct any kind of Cycles material you can imagine.
• Shading for Blender Render After the Cycles chapters, an equivalent fundamental education follows in context of Blender's legacy render engine: Blender Render. You will see how to function in the Material and Texture panel as opposed to the Node Editor with Cycles. This engine is not a physically-based and thus lends itself to NPR (non-photo-realistic) rendering. CC Music: "Home Tonight" by DoKashiteru