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 Displacement maps in Blender

We will now learn how to generate Displacement maps inside Blender, without using an image texture or an external image-editing program. In the following steps, we will learn how to make surfaces appear more natural using Blender-generated Displacement maps:

  1. Create a cube, and add a Subdivision Surface modifier to it.
Figure 6.25 – Adding a Subdivision Surface modifier to a cube

Figure 6.25 – Adding a Subdivision Surface modifier to a cube

  1. Set the Levels Viewport value to 5 or 6.

    Keep in mind that subdividing objects to this level may make Blender slower, or even cause crashes.

Figure 6.26 – Increasing the subdivision level

Figure 6.26 – Increasing the subdivision level

  1. Use the arrow symbol marked in Figure 6.27 to collapse the Subdivision Surface modifier menu, and then add a Displace modifier.
Figure 6.27 – Collapsing a modifier (left) and adding a Displace modifier (right)

Figure 6.27 – Collapsing a modifier (left) and adding a Displace modifier (right)

  1. In the Texture Properties tab,...