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

Unwrapping complex shapes

We will now use the simple unwrapping methods that we learned about to unwrap some more complex 3D models. For practice, we will unwrap the low-poly Tiger Tank turret, which can be downloaded using the link in the Technical requirements section of this book. You can see what it looks like in Figure 7.14.

Figure 7.14 – A Tiger Tank turret

Figure 7.14 – A Tiger Tank turret

This exercise will teach us all the most important principles necessary for UV-unwrapping, which will allow us to correctly UV-unwrap almost any other object:

  1. First, let’s create a new image with an Image Texture node, in the material on the object, and set Generated Type to UV Grid.
Figure 7.15 – Generating an image

Figure 7.15 – Generating an image

Applying the UV Grid texture to the object without any mapping will probably create a messy result, as shown in Figure 7.16. There is a lot of visible stretching, compression, and bending in the pattern, so the texture...