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

Creating a bullet hole decal

Decals are images with transparent backgrounds that can be painted onto a texture to look like a sticker. When painting decals, it is useful to have a reference image of what we try to paint. This will help us accurately recreate a shape as a decal.

In the following steps, we will use GIMP to create a bullet hole decal, which we can then texture-paint on any other texture:

  1. Open GIMP and create a new image with Shift + N. Set the size to 512 x 512.
Figure 9.27 – Creating a new 512 x 512 image

Figure 9.27 – Creating a new 512 x 512 image

  1. Add an alpha channel using the Layer menu.
Figure 9.28 – Adding an alpha channel to the image

Figure 9.28 – Adding an alpha channel to the image

  1. Delete the background, set the brush color to gray, and set a large brush size with a diameter of approximately half the width of the canvas, by pressing Ctrl + Alt and scrolling up. This brush will be used to create the shape of the bullet hole.
Figure 9.29 – Clearing the image and preparing the brush
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