One of the most advanced 3D packages on the scene, Blender now has a powerful new tool to allow its users to achieve even more astonishing results: the Cycles rendering engine. Cycles is based on an accurate lighting model and realistic shaders. It is also blazing fast thanks to the fact that it can take advantage of modern GPUrendering capabilities. Cycles is definitely a modern and effective tool that every Blender user wants to know in order to get the best results. Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook will take you a journey through the new great Blender rendering engine Cycles. We will start with understanding the fundamental concepts of this rendering engine, and use them to learn the creation of any kind of lighting, material, texture and setup. At the end of the book, both beginners and more advanced users will not only be able to create virtually any kind of shader and lighting, but will also be able to find and experiment with new techniques on their own. Thanks to the logical way in which the topics are presented in the book readers will be able to create their work without additional tutorials just using the knowledge they will master by reading this book.
Chapter 1, Key Holder and Wallet Studio Shot, will highlight the fundamentals of lighting with the creation of materials in Cycles. Finally this chapter will teach you how to set up the render parameters in Cycles
Chapter 2, Creating Different Glass Materials in Cycles, will help us create from the most basic to really advanced glass materials. To achieve this we will go deeper into the Cycles material creation, learning interesting node trees and techniques.
Chapter 3, Creating an Interior Scene, will help us with the creation of an interior scene, a situation that can be quite challenging without proper knowledge. You will learn how to light a scene in an efficient way, along with new materials and advanced techniques.
Chapter 4, Creating an Exterior Scene, will help you learn the secrets of exterior lighting. Here we will learn how to create a flawless natural exterior lighting using different advanced techniques together with the creation of new materials.
Chapter 5, Creating a Cartoonish Scene, will teach you how to create stylized yet appealing lighting materials, for example a fake subsurface scattering and hair material, ideal for a cartoon scene.
Chapter 6, Creating a Toy Movie Scene, will show you how to create a lighting setup that will resemble a movie set, together with highly realistic materials. Moreover you will learn different techniques to give our image an even closer look to that of a cinema movie.
Chapter 7, Car Rendering in Cycleswill help you set up great studio lighting to make the car look great and of course, will show you how to create complex and captivating car paint material.
Chapter 8, Creating a Car Animation, will help you deal with your first animation and explain to you how to setup Cycles at its best for this purpose. You will optimize the scene to lower render times while maintaining a high quality and detail level, and learn how to deal with a huge project.
Chapter 9, Creating an Iceberg Scene, will highlight some really advanced material creation in Cycles, and some greatly advanced techniques about seamlessly mixing two materials inside the same mesh. Moreover you will learn to use information from scene objects to use for even more advanced materials.
Chapter 10, Creating Food Materials in Cycles, the final chapter, will talk about the creation of food, one of the most challenging topics to deal with in Computer Graphics. This chapter will teach you the creation of highly realistic and complex Cycles materials.
The only program needed to follow the recipes of this book is Blender, which can be freely downloaded from the official Blender foundation website www.blender.org.
This book is aimed at both beginners and more advanced Cycles users, as it will take you from the very first steps up to quite advanced techniques. Even more advanced users could pickup several new things reading this book.
Although every topic is described in detail, some basic knowledge of Blender as a package is advisable.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Again we will have to duplicate the material and name it Rim_Light."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Let's start by going to the System tab, and in the lower-left corner, you will see the Compute Device setting area."
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