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

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how to download textures and texture maps from the internet and apply them in Blender using nodes. We then learned how to create our own Roughness maps and Normal maps in Blender, with the help of GIMP. Having access to an image editing program such as GIMP is important because almost any 3D project will require some external image editing, whether it is for texture maps, custom textures, decals, or post-processing.

We also learned how to bake normal maps. This allows us to easily turn surface details into normal maps that we can apply to any material. Baking can also be used for colors and roughness, and it is a great way to convert procedural materials into savable images.

In the next chapter, we will learn how to create some common materials by using the tools and techniques that we’ve learned, combining them with some tips and tricks to make them look realistic on a 3D model.