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

Understanding the default nodes

Let’s begin by studying the default nodes. In the Shader Editor window, we will find two nodes, as shown in Figure 2.1.

Figure 2.1 – Default nodes in the Shader Editor

Figure 2.1 – Default nodes in the Shader Editor

We will learn what these nodes are, what they can do, and how they work together to create materials.

The big node from Figure 2.1, with lots of sliders and buttons, is called the Principled BSDF node. You probably noticed that this node has almost all the sliders and properties from the Material Properties tab on the right side of the screen, as shown in Figure 2.2.

Figure 2.2 – The Principled BSDF node versus the Material Properties tab

Figure 2.2 – The Principled BSDF node versus the Material Properties tab

The reason that this node is the same as the Material Properties tab is because they serve the same purpose: to gather all the most important material properties and make them easy to control. This set of properties makes up the Principled BSDF shader.

The reason we...