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

Creating Roughness maps in Blender

We will now learn to use nodes to convert an Albedo map into a Roughness map and apply it to our material. This method is useful because it gives us direct control over the Roughness map, so we can make changes to it without loading it into an external program every time.

In the following steps, we will use nodes to turn an Albedo map into a Roughness map:

  1. Load an Albedo map through a Node Wrangler.
Figure 5.12 – Loading the Albedo map

Figure 5.12 – Loading the Albedo map

  1. Add a second Node Wrangler, and once again, load the Albedo map into the Image Texture node.

    These nodes should be plugged into the Roughness input, with Color Space set to Non-Color.

Figure 5.13 – Converting an Albedo map into a Roughness map

Figure 5.13 – Converting an Albedo map into a Roughness map

  1. In the second Image Texture node, click on the button marked with 2.
Figure 5.14 – Making a copy of an image

Figure 5.14 – Making a copy of an image

This will make a copy of...