Book Image

Photorealistic Materials and Textures in Blender Cycles - Fourth Edition

By : Arijan Belec
Book Image

Photorealistic Materials and Textures in Blender Cycles - Fourth Edition

By: Arijan Belec

Overview of this book

Blender is one of the most versatile tools in the 3D software industry, and with a growing audience and constantly expanding set of features, it has become more powerful, useful, and in demand than ever before. This updated fourth edition of Photorealistic Materials and Textures in Blender Cycles is an all-inclusive guide to procedural texturing, rendering, and designing materials in Blender, covering all aspects of the 3D texturing workflow. The book begins by introducing you to Blender’s material nodes and material property functions, and then helps you create photorealistic textures by understanding texture maps and mapping them to 3D models. As you advance, you’ll learn to design high-quality environments and lighting using HDRIs and Blender’s lighting options. By exploring, breaking down, and studying the underlying mechanics that allow you to develop these elements, you’ll create any material, texture, or environment and use it to improve your artwork and present them in a professional way. Finally, you’ll discover how to correctly set up scenes and render settings, and get to grips with the key elements of achieving realism. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a solid understanding of materials, textures, shading, lighting, rendering, and all the critical aspects of achieving the highest quality with your 3D artwork.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1: Materials in Cycles
5
Part 2: Understanding Realistic Texturing
9
Part 3: UV Mapping and Texture Painting
14
Part 4: Lighting and Rendering

Understanding UV mapping

UV mapping is the process of applying textures to 3D models by unwrapping them into two-dimensional maps known as UV maps. To understand how UV mapping works, we need to visualize a simple example. Figure 7.1 illustrates how a cube can be unwrapped into a 2D map.

Figure 7.1 – A UV-unwrapped cube

Figure 7.1 – A UV-unwrapped cube

A cube will typically produce a UV map shaped like the surface shown in Figure 7.2. As you can see, some of the cube’s edges were cut to allow for unwrapping, but some of the edges stayed connected. We will learn which edges to cut shortly.

Figure 7.2 – The UV map of a cube

Figure 7.2 – The UV map of a cube

When placed over an image texture, the UV map covers a certain area, as shown in Figure 7.3. This covered area is then projected on the surface of the 3D object, as we saw previously in Figure 7.1.

Figure 7.3 – A UV map placed over a texture

Figure 7.3 – A UV map placed over a texture

Similarly, a cylinder can be UV-unwrapped...