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 image mapping

We will first discuss how Blender projects images on 3D models, and how we can control this. Let’s look at how a texture appears on a cube by default over the next few steps:

  1. Add a new material to the default cube.
Figure 3.1 – Adding a material to the default cube

Figure 3.1 – Adding a material to the default cube

  1. Using the skills we learned in Chapter 2, Introducing Material Nodes, add an Image Texture node and load or generate an image for the material.
Figure 3.2 – Adding an image texture to the material

Figure 3.2 – Adding an image texture to the material

  1. Open the UV Editing workspace from the bar at the top of the screen.
Figure 3.3 – Opening the UV Editing workspace

Figure 3.3 – Opening the UV Editing workspace

You have now split the screen into two windows. On the left, we have the UV Editor, and on the right, we have the 3D viewport where we can see the object.

Figure 3.4 – The UV Editing workspace

Figure 3.4 – The UV Editing workspace

The UV Editor...