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

Applying the Ambient Occlusion map with nodes

We will now learn how to apply an AO map to a material and use it to improve our textures.

First, let’s plug the Image Texture node with the AO map into the Base Color input of the Principled BSDF node, as shown in Figure 8.10.

Figure 8.10 – Plugging the AO map into the Principled BSDF node

Figure 8.10 – Plugging the AO map into the Principled BSDF node

This will add some shading to the 3D model, as shown in Figure 8.11.

Figure 8.11 – The effect of an AO map as visible in the viewport

Figure 8.11 – The effect of an AO map as visible in the viewport

Currently, the shading is not very noticeable and makes a minimal difference. In the next few steps, we will add some nodes so that we can tweak the result:

  1. Add a Bright/Contrast node and tweak the values to change the darkness and width of the shadows to your preference. This is demonstrated in Figure 8.12.
Figure 8.12 – Controlling the AO map with a Bright/Contrast node

Figure 8.12 – Controlling the AO map with a Bright/Contrast node

  1. Add a ColorRamp...