Book Image

Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook - Second Edition

Book Image

Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Blender provides a broad spectrum of modeling, texturing, lighting, animation and video post-processing functionality in one package. It provides cross-platform interoperability, extensibility and a tightly integrated workflow. Blender is one of the most popular Open Source 3D graphics applications in the world. Modern GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit) have some limitations for rendering complex scenes. This is mainly because of limited memory, and interactivity issues when the same graphics card is also used for displaying and rendering frames. This is where Cycles rendering engine comes into play. Cycles is bundled as an add-on with Blender. Some of the features of Cycles is its quality, speed and having integrated industry standard libraries. This book will show you how to carry out your first steps in Cycles - a brand new rendering engine for Blender. In a gradual and logical way, you will learn how to create complex shaders and lighting setups to face any kind of situation that you may find in Computer Graphics. This book provides information on how to setup your first application in Cycles. You will start by adding lights, materials, and textures to your scene. When it's time for the final render, you will see how to setup Cycles in the best way. You will learn about a wide variety of materials, lighting, techniques, tips, and tricks to get the best out of Cycles. Further on in the book, you will get to know about animation and still shots, and learn how to create advanced materials for realistic rendering, as well cartoon style shaders. This cookbook contains a wide range of different scenes, proposed in a structured and progressive order. During this journey, you will get involved in the concepts behind every step you take in order to really master what you learn.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Introduction
Index

Creating custom fake caustics


The caustics we created in the previous recipe are the default ones generated directly by Cycles. They are the most accurate you can get, but there are ways to obtain fake caustics, which render much faster and with less noise. This is what we will learn in this recipe.

Getting ready

Let's now see how to create caustics using another method. Inside Blender, we will need to tweak each glass shader in our scene. We will start with our Clean_Glass shader. So let's select it and go to the material node editor. Just one last thing before we start. We need to activate the No Caustics option again in the menu rendered, as we do not need them with this method.

How to do it…

  1. Inside the material node editor we need to add three nodes: Transparent BSDF (Add | Shader), a Mix node (Add | Shader) and a Light Path node (Add | Input).

  2. Let's use the Mix node to mix the glass and Transparent BSDF. We will connect the glass in the first socket and Transparent BSDF in the second. As...