What this book covers
Chapter 1, Most Common Modeling Mistakes That Prevent You from Achieving Photorealism, will cover all the mistakes that designers make in 3D modeling and scale matching and will show the reader the ways to fix and overcome these challenges by working on a real wood cabin reference.
Chapter 2, The Basics of Realistic Texturing in Blender, will highlight the importance of using different texturing maps to achieve photorealism. We will learn how to create a real wood material from scratch using procedural texturing.
Chapter 3, Efficient Unwrapping and Texturing in Blender, will go through the process of unwrapping the wood cabin and texturing it in Blender – starting by importing materials from one scene into another, understanding how UV mapping works, and using the Displace modifier to add random details to the wood geometry.
Chapter 4, Creating Realistic Natural Plants in Blender, will involve creating a ground under our wood cabin, using the Proportional Editing tool to add nice hills to the ground. Then, we will go through the process of creating, unwrapping, and texturing different types of plants and leaves. Next, we will learn how to use the Particle System tool to scatter objects randomly across a surface, scattering plants and leaves all over the ground.
Chapter 5, Achieve Photorealistic Lighting in Your Environment with Blender, will detail three ways to lighten the wood cabin scene. We will achieve lighting that matches the same lighting we have in the wood cabin reference we’re using.
Chapter 6, Creating Realistic Landscapes in Blender, will guide you on how to create realistic snow and rocky mountains. We will learn to install the A.N.T add-on, create various landscapes, tweak its settings and change its shape to make it look as realistic as possible.
Chapter 7, Creating and Animating Realistic, Natural-Looking Water, will handle the step of creating a realistic water shader. We will learn to mix between the Glass BSDF and Transparency BSDF nodes to create a nice reflective and refractive surface. Then we will learn to animate the waves on the surface of the water by inserting keyframes into the Timeline editor.
Chapter 8, Creating Procedural Mud Material, will tap into the unlimited potential of Blender’s incredibly powerful node editor. You will learn to create a Mud material using procedural texturing by combining many different layers of details, such as adding water puddles, stones, and mud details.
Chapter 9, Texturing the Landscape with Mud Material, will entail texturing the landscape with the Mud material. You will learn how to mix different materials – here, the rocky snow and mud. You will also learn how to optimize and organize your node setup using groups.
Chapter 10, Creating Natural Assets: Rock, will teach you how to create realistic rock assets. These rocks are perfect for giving a realistic and natural feeling to our landscape environment.
Chapter 11, Creating Realistic Flowers in Blender, will describe how to create organic-looking flowers for our landscape environment based on real references.
Chapter 12, Using Particle System to Scatter Objects in Blender, will outline how to use the Particle System tool in Blender to scatter flowers and rocks throughout our landscape environment. You will understand Particle System in Blender, and how to add and place particles in a specific chosen area, as well as changing the scale and rotation of particles while controlling their number.
Chapter 13, Finalizing the Landscape Scene – Lighting, Rendering, and Compositing, will sum up our processes and the book by teaching you how to aim your camera to render awesome landscape shots. Next, you will learn some compositing tricks to make the final render stand out.