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

Applying HDRIs in Blender

We will now learn to apply the downloaded HDRI image in Blender. This technique will allow us to load custom textures as world backgrounds. In the following steps, we will load the .EXR file in Blender using nodes:

  1. In the Shading workspace, switch the Shader Editor mode to World, as shown in Figure 12.7.

    This will load a separate node space where we can create materials for the world instead of an object.

Figure 12.7 – Switching to world shading

Figure 12.7 – Switching to world shading

Here, we will find the Background node, which defines the color and brightness of the environment. This is where we will apply our HDRI background. By default, the environment is dark gray and emits some light, as we can see in Figure 12.8.

Figure 12.8 – Background color as defined by the Background node

Figure 12.8 – Background color as defined by the Background node

We can change this color the same way we change the base color of a material in a Principled BSDF node, as we learned in the Creating...