Book Image

Blender 3D: Characters, Machines, and Scenes for Artists

By : Enrico Valenza, Christopher Kuhn, Pierre-Armand Nicq, Romain Caudron
Book Image

Blender 3D: Characters, Machines, and Scenes for Artists

By: Enrico Valenza, Christopher Kuhn, Pierre-Armand Nicq, Romain Caudron

Overview of this book

Blender 3D is one of the top 3D animation software available. As the Blender software grows more powerful and popular, there is a demand to take your modeling skills to the next level. This learning path is divided into three modules that will take you on this incredible journey of creating games. The first module will take you on a journey to understand the workflow normally used to create characters, from the modeling to the rendering stages, using the tools of the last official release of Blender exclusively. You will be making production-quality 3D models and characters quickly and efficiently, which will be ready to be added to your very own animated feature or game. The second module will help you develop a comprehensive skill set that covers the key aspects of mechanical modeling. You will create many types of projects, including a pistol, spacecraft, robot, and a racer. By the end of this module, you will have mastered a workflow that you will be able to apply to your own creations. The final module will help you to create many types of projects using a step-by-step approach. Each project in this module will give you more practice and increase your knowledge of the Blender tools and game engine. This learning path combines some of the best that Packt has to offer in one complete, curated package. It includes content from the following Packt products: ? Blender 3D Cookbook, Second Edition by Enrico Valenza ? Blender 3D Incredible Machines, Second Edition by Christopher Kuhn ? Blender 3D By Example by Romain Caudron and Pierre-Armand Nicq
Table of Contents (5 chapters)
4
Index

Chapter 6. Haunted House – Adding Materials and Lights in Cycles

This chapter will be devoted to the Cycles render engine. You will learn how to achieve a convincing render of the haunted house by understanding the different types of light work and by creating complex materials using the previously made textures. You will learn some nice tricks such as how to produce normal maps of our hand-painted textures without leaving Blender or how to create realistic-looking grass. You will also discover how to use the Cycles baking tool. In order to conclude our project, we will show you how to integrate a mist effect in the final composition.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Understanding the essential settings of Cycles
  • Using lights
  • Painting and using an Image Base Lighting
  • Creating basic materials with nodes
  • Using procedural textures
  • Baking textures in Cycles for real-time rendering

Understanding the basic settings of Cycles

To switch to the Cycles render engine, you...