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

Tweaking material properties

In this section, we will learn about new material properties such as Roughness, Specular, Metallic, and more. This information will help us improve our understanding of how materials work in Blender, which we can then put to good use to create high-quality materials and textures.

Specular

The Specular property is used to determine how much light is reflected by a surface. If you rotate the cube in the 3D viewport, you will notice that the object has a shiny surface, as is visible in Figure 1.13. This is because the object is specular.

Figure 1.13 – Specular surface

Figure 1.13 – Specular surface

We can control the specular level using the Specular slider in the Material Properties tab, as shown in Figure 1.14.

Figure 1.14 – The Specular slider

Figure 1.14 – The Specular slider

When we reduce the specular level on one of the materials to 0.000, light will no longer be reflected by the surface and it will become much darker, as shown in Figure...