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

Introducing Roughness maps

Roughness maps, as the name suggests, are images used to control the level of roughness on different parts of a texture. Lower levels of roughness will lead to a glossier object. Adjusting this property with a roughness map can have a significant impact on the level of realism of a material, as not all parts of a material always have the same level of roughness. Figure 4.4 shows the Roughness map corresponding to the Albedo map from Figure 4.1.

Figure 4.4 – A Roughness map for a brick texture

Figure 4.4 – A Roughness map for a brick texture

As you can see, the Roughness map looks just like the Albedo map, except it is black and white. To understand how a roughness map works, let’s view the Roughness slider in the Principled BSDF node, shown in Figure 4.5.

Figure 4.5 – Roughness slider in the Principled BSDF node

Figure 4.5 – Roughness slider in the Principled BSDF node

To control the roughness of a material, we only need to give Blender a single numerical value between 0.000 and 1...