Making Of / 23 January 2026

Material Maker Learning Material - Animated Alarm Clock

More a learning tutorial for myself to get more familiar with material maker. A simple animated material clock.

Very quick breakdown.

  1. Create display section using seven segment nodes and align.
  2. Add a text node for the separation dots and align.
  3. Create a series of squares using shape node and define depth of each section with greyscale uniform nodes. So the display looks deeper than glass surface.
  4. Create segment lines adding and subtracting shape nodes then set height.
  5. Used a dirt node for the rough surface then subtracted the segment lines.
  6. Ambient Occlusion, Roughness and Metallic created using combination of other outputs a dedicated Occlusion node is provided too.
  7. The flashing dots were created using some basic GLSL code added to the opacity of the dots using the expression panel.
  8. The pulsing segment light was again created using GLSL code but this time a more smoothed ramping effect added to the opacity of the emission and albedo as it gives a stronger effect.

Here is the full graph

Final render in preview 3d window.