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

Generating Texture Maps with Cycles

In this chapter, we will learn to acquire or create texture maps both inside Blender and with the help of GIMP. GIMP is a popular, free image-editing program that we will use throughout this book to create texture maps and custom decals. We will begin by exploring ways to find textures online, before learning about the different ways to turn textures into texture maps. We will then apply the textures to our materials in Blender.

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to create, download, and apply your own materials and texture maps in Blender.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

  • Using texture libraries
  • Applying texture maps in Blender
  • Creating Roughness maps in Blender
  • Baking Normal maps in Blender
  • Generating Roughness maps in GIMP
  • Generating Normal maps in GIMP