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

Improving edges with texture painting

We will now learn how to use texture painting to improve our material by painting over its edges. We will use a simple cube to demonstrate this technique, but you can apply it to any model or texture. In the following steps, we will shade the edges of our cube:

  1. First, add some loop cuts near the edges and smooth shading to the cube to make the edges appear smoother, as shown in Figure 9.10.
Figure 9.10 – Smoothing the edges

Figure 9.10 – Smoothing the edges

The loop cuts will automatically be added to the UV map.

  1. Open the Color menu in the Image Editor and select the Eyedropper tool, as shown in Figure 9.11.
Figure 9.11 – Picking a color with the Eyedropper tool

Figure 9.11 – Picking a color with the Eyedropper tool

Then, click on the dark image texture to copy its color.

  1. Increase the Value setting by approximately 0.015, as shown in Figure 9.12.

    This slight increase in brightness will allow us to lightly shade the edges.

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