Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook

Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook

Overview of this book

Blender 2.5 is one of the most usable 3D suites available. Its material and texture functions offer spectacular surface creation possibilities. It can take you hours just to create basic textures and materials in Blender and when you think of creating complex materials and textures you are petrified. Imagine how you will feel when you overcome these obstacles. This book wastes no time on boring theory and bombards you with examples of ready-created materials and textures from the start, with clear instructions on how they were created, and what you can learn from them for making your own. It covers all core Blender functions you will ever need to easily create perfect simulation of objects from the simplest to the most complex ones. The book begins with recipes that show you how to create natural surface materials, including a variety of pebbles, rocks, wood, and water, as well as man-made metals, complete with rust. By utilizing some of the easiest-to-use animation tools available, you will be able to produce accurate movement in mesh objects. Familiarize yourself with a plethora of tools that will help you to effectively organize your textures and materials. You will learn how to emulate the reflective properties of natural materials and how to simulate materials such as rusted iron, which is difficult to make believable. Transparency and reflection are both tricky natural surface properties to simulate but these recipes will make it easy. Explore ways to speed up animations by using special painting techniques to significantly lower render times. By the end of the book, you will be able to simulate some of the most difficult effects to recreate in any 3D suite, such as smoke, fire, and explosions.

Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Creating Natural Materials in Blender

Introduction

Creating a realistic pebble material using procedural textures

Creating a gray limestone pebble

Creating the quartz pebble material

Creating an opalescent quartz material

Creating a mask to represent the quartz veins

Combining two materials, to make a third, using Nodes

Creating a large rock material using procedural, and node textures

Creating a sea rock material

Creating a texture node to simulate seaweed at the base of a rock

Creating a large rock face using photo reference

Creating Man-made Materials

Introduction

Creating a slate roof node material that repeats but with ultimate variety

Using a tileable texture to add complexity to a surface

Warping a texture to disguise seams in a repeated texture

Adding weathering by copying and reusing textures

Combining materials using nodes

Creating metals

Using specular maps to add age and variety to man-made surface materials

Adding oxidization weathering to our copper material

Adding grime and artistic interest to our copper material

Creating a path or road material that never repeats

Repeating a tiled texture to duplicated objects

Deforming materials and textures in Blender

Creating Animated Materials

Introduction

How to move textures and create animation without moving a mesh

Manipulating the F-Curves of texture movement

Using an Empty as a dummy object to control texture movement over time

A barber pole with no moving parts

How to alter the color of materials and textures over time

Creating a red hot iron bar

How to animate transparency in a texture

Creating a burning sheet of paper

How to change textures during an animation

How to texture with movies creating a TV screen

Managing Blender Materials

Introduction

Setting a default scene for materials creation

Additional settings for default scene

Creating an ideal Blender interface for material creation

Creating an ideal texture animation setup

Naming materials and textures

Appending materials

Linking materials

Making blendfiles stand alone

Creating More Difficult Man-made Materials

Introduction

Creating rust on iron-based metals

Creating a mesh object to provide good reflective surfaces

Using environment map textures to simulate reflection

Varying environment map reflections to simulate corrosion or wear

Using raytrace reflections to simulate polished metals

Varying raytrace reflections to simulate dirt and grime

Creating More Difficult Natural Materials

Introduction

Creating realistic large-scale water in Blender 2.5

Setting up an ocean vista environment

Creating a wave surface using textures

Creating an ocean surface material

Creating wake around objects in water

Creating a non-repeating leaf material

Creating image and bump maps, with alpha channels

Using images as the basis for a leaf material

Using alpha to create a leaf shape on a simple mesh

Adding a non-repeating bump to the leaf material

Adding color complexity to the leaf material

UV Mapping and Sub Surface Scattering

Introduction

Creating a face map from photographs

Unwrapping a face mesh to produce a UV map

Editing a UV map to optimize the image space

Creating multiple UV maps for a single object

Combining UV maps to create an enveloping UV

Using a paint package to merge UV maps

Extracting color, bump, and specularity maps from photographs

Applying UVs to create an accurate skin material

Skin shading using SSS and AO

Painting and Modifying Image Textures in Blender

Introduction

Post processing rendered images from within Blender

Adding more than one material to a surface

Adding dirt onto a model

Creating an aged photo with simple Blender materials

Special Effects Materials

Introduction

Creating explosive smoke in Blender

Igniting a flame and making things burn in Blender

Creating loopable fire and smoke sequences

Adding complex FX without the render overhead

Index

Customer Reviews

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About the Author

Colin Litster started his passion for animation, and things 3D, after studying for an Art degree with 3D in its title. At that time computer animation had not even happened, but working as a special effects cameraman in the British film industry convinced Colin that there must be better ways of generating film effects other than directly in the camera, or by post processing in the labs. After studying further he discovered the microprocessor and became hooked on using this new computer technology to further those ideas.

Colin moved into higher education, eventually to the position of Head of IT and Media Services in the south east of England. In 2002, Colin discovered the relatively unknown Open Source 3D suite called Blender. After working with all of the commercial 3D applications up until that point, Colin thought that this young upstart of an application must be inferior. However, after just one week of use Colin realized that Blender was not only capable of most things 3D, it was also incredibly easy to use. At this point, Colin realized that an ambition to produce a full-length 3D feature was possible to achieve with this package. Embracing the Open Source ethos, Colin wanted to give something back to the community so he decided to document and create tutorials for others to see its potential. Some of Colin's ocean, smoke, and special effect tutorials have become a driving force in how to stretch the use of this superb 3D tool.

Colin was a contributor to the Blender Summer of Code documentation project with the Blender Foundation in 2006. Since then he has been a contributing author to the Essential Blender book edited by Roland Hess, and Ton Roosendaal. Colin has also been a presenter at the Blender Conference showing others how he approaches material and texture creation to create the impossible using the Blender 3D suite.

I would like to thank Sarah Cullington, my commissioning editor, and all the wonderful people at Packt Publishing who have gently guided and encouraged my development of this book. I would also like to thank Tony Mullen who has been urging me to put together my material experiments since 2006. I also cannot forget Ton Roosendaal and all the wonderful developer community of Blender. But mostly, I must thank my lovely wife Eveline as without her complete encouragement and support this book could not have been written. I love you very much.

Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook

Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook

Overview of this book

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Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook

About the Author