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

Using stencils in Blender

We will now learn how to use the stencil texture painting feature in Blender. This allows us to add custom decals to our textures. In the following steps, we will use the bullet hole decal as a stencil in Blender, by importing from the bullet hole decal that we just created in GIMP:

  1. In Blender, create a new texture slot and load the bullet hole decal, as shown in Figure 9.36.
Figure 9.36 – Loading the bullet hole decal in Blender

Figure 9.36 – Loading the bullet hole decal in Blender

  1. Next, select the bullet hole decal in the Texture section of the Image Editor toolbar, and set Mapping to Stencil.
Figure 9.37 – Using the bullet hole as a stencil

Figure 9.37 – Using the bullet hole as a stencil

This will load the bullet hole decal in the lower-left corner of the 3D View. We can move this image around by right-clicking on it and dragging it.

Figure 9.38 – The stencil visible in 3D View

Figure 9.38 – The stencil visible in 3D View

If you hold Shift and then click and drag the...