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

Mixing Diffuse and Ambient Occlusion maps in GIMP

We will now learn how to bake a Diffuse map and mix it with an AO map with GIMP. This will allow us to store both textures in one image, which reduces the number of nodes needed. In the following steps, we will bake our texture into a Diffuse map:

Add an Image Texture node and generate a blank image named Diffuse Map, as shown in Figure 8.21. Keep this node disconnected from other nodes.

Figure 8.21 – Generating a blank image

Figure 8.21 – Generating a blank image

  1. In the Bake section of the Render Properties tab, set Bake Type to Diffuse.

    For the best results, unplug all the nodes except the base color.

Figure 8.22 – Setting Bake Type to Diffuse

Figure 8.22 – Setting Bake Type to Diffuse

  1. Uncheck Direct and Indirect and bake the image by clicking on the Bake button.

    Disabling direct and indirect contributions will prevent reflections of light from interfering with the color of the image. Make sure that the Image Texture node with...