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

Creating Materials in Blender

Generating high-quality materials and textures is a big and important step in any area of 3D design. With the right skills, tools, and techniques, you can turn your untextured 3D models into beautiful photorealistic scenes and artwork. That is exactly what we are aiming for in this book. Therefore, we will study the underlying mechanics of materials and textures in Blender, and learn how to produce the highest quality results, to teach you how to finish and present your work in the most attractive way possible.

In this chapter, we will learn to create simple materials in Blender. We will first prepare our workspace, optimize it for a material creation workflow, and introduce the interface, before creating our first materials. We will learn to control key material properties including base color, roughness, and specularity, among others.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • Preparing the Shading workspace
  • Creating materials...