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

Exporting images and videos

Regardless of the engine you choose to work in, there are many settings that can be configured when exporting images. These settings define the resolution of your image, which keyframes will be rendered, which format you are exporting as, the frame rate used, and more. These settings can be found in the Output Properties tab, as shown in Figure 14.12.

Figure 14.12 – Export settings in the Output Properties tab

Figure 14.12 – Export settings in the Output Properties tab

Let us look at them in more detail:

  • Resolution: Firstly, it is important to define the Resolution values. By default, it is set to 1920x1080 (full HD). For quick renders or previews, it is recommended to set the resolution to 1280x720 to reduce render time. Naturally, final renders should be created in higher resolutions.
  • Frame Range: When exporting animations, such as the animation we created in Chapter 13, Preparing the Camera for Rendering, it is important to define which frames should be rendered...