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

Preparing the Shading workspace

Blender has multiple workspaces. A workspace is simply a way of arranging the windows and tools in Blender to make them more convenient for a particular job. For example, the Modeling workspace makes available the most important modeling tools and windows. The Shading workspace will do the same but for shading and material creation. We will work in the Shading workspace because it provides us with all the tools we need for now.

By default, Blender displays four separate windows in the workspace, as indicated in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 – Default Blender workspace

Figure 1.1 – Default Blender workspace

To work with materials, we will need some different windows. To save time, we can avoid having to open these windows manually by clicking on the Shading button on the bar at the top of the screen, as shown in Figure 1.2.

The Shading workspace has some new useful windows for texturing and creating materials. We now have a Shader Editor window, which we...