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

Snapping and moving the camera

In this section, we will study some ways to snap and move the camera. Snapping the camera means instantaneously bringing it to a certain point in space. Moving the camera means smoothly panning, shifting, and sliding it as, for instance, a cameraman would on a movie set. We will begin by snapping it so that we can set a starting point for the camera.

Snapping the camera

There are two ways of snapping the camera in Blender. One way is to snap it to the 3D view, and another is to snap it to the 3D cursor. The best way to place a camera is to align it with your 3D view. This is because we can get a preview of what the camera will see before placing it there. To do so, place your 3D view in a way that you can see what you would like the camera to see. For example, we can place our 3D view so that we are looking at the scene from above, like in Figure 13.4.

Figure 13.4 – Top view of the scene

Figure 13.4 – Top view of the scene

We can now align the...