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 Ambient Occlusion maps

AO maps are texture maps used to simulate soft shadows on 3D models. Figure 8.1 shows a model without an AO map (left) and a model with one (right). The left model has no shading and does not look realistic, while the right model has visible shading and looks like it is in a real environment.

Figure 8.1 – A model before and after adding an AO map

Figure 8.1 – A model before and after adding an AO map

Now let’s dive into what an AO map looks like. In Figure 8.2, we can see the AO map used on the model from Figure 8.1.

Figure 8.2 – An AO map

Figure 8.2 – An AO map

As you can see, it is mostly white with some gray and black areas. The purpose of this texture map is to shade the creases of the model. We can use this image texture in combination with other textures to improve their shading and shade creases to make the model look more realistic.

Now that we understand what an AO map is, we will move on to learning how to make one in Blender.

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