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

Adding basic materials to the steering wheel

In this section, we will add some simple materials and texture maps to the steering wheel model. First, we will create two separate leather materials for the handles and the center pad, and then a carbon fiber material for the connectors.

Adding texture to handles

In the following steps, we will take a downloaded leather texture and its texture maps and apply them to the steering wheel’s handles:

  1. First, download a leather material of your choice from textures.com.
Figure 10.1 – Downloading a leather material from textures.com

Figure 10.1 – Downloading a leather material from textures.com

  1. Add a new black material to the steering wheel handles, as shown in Figure 10.2.
Figure 10.2 – Adding a black material

Figure 10.2 – Adding a black material

We will use texture maps to turn this material into leather.

  1. Add a Node Wrangler with Ctrl + T and load the downloaded leather Normal map into the Image Texture node. Set Texture Coordinate...