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

Mapping textures to 3D models

We will now learn to use Node Wrangler to quickly map textures onto any 3D model. Typically, it is best to map textures by manually UV-unwrapping the model, but that is a slow and tedious process that can often be avoided simply by using the Node Wrangler add-on. We will learn about UV mapping later, as it creates better results than Node Wrangler, but is more difficult to learn. So for now, we will learn how to apply a simple texture to a complex object in just a few steps:

  1. Add the Node Wrangler nodes to the Principled BSDF node in a new material.
Figure 3.27 – Adding the Node Wrangler nodes to a new material

Figure 3.27 – Adding the Node Wrangler nodes to a new material

  1. Load an image into the Image Texture node. By default, the Texture Coordinate node is set to UV. Since we did not UV-unwrap the model and Blender does not know how to correctly unwrap this model without our help, the result will be a complete mess.
Figure 3.28 – Default settings in Node Wrangler

Figure 3.28 &...