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

Using Normal maps to detail surfaces

Normal maps are special texture maps used to simulate surface details and bumps. Their purpose is to increase the level of apparent detail on a texture or object without adding any new geometry. Normal maps, as with other texture maps, can also be applied through Image Texture nodes, but they will require us to change a few extra things to let Blender know that this is a special type of image. Figure 4.11 shows an example of a Normal map.

Figure 4.11 – A simple Normal map

Figure 4.11 – A simple Normal map

To apply this Normal map, we must first set Color Space to Non-Color in the Image Texture node. Then, we must add a normal map node and plug it into the Normal input of the Principled BSDF node. Blender will now know how to read this image correctly.

Figure 4.12 – Processing a Normal map

Figure 4.12 – Processing a Normal map

If we apply this Normal map to a material, it will simulate bumps on the surface, as shown in Figure 4.13.

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