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 the grass material


We will now create the grass. In this case, we will use meshes instanced on the Ground mesh using a hair particle system.

Getting ready

To start, let's go to layer 5 where all our meshes that will be instanced are. It can be a good idea also to move the Sun to this layer temporarily, so that we are able to set up the materials with the final lighting. Let's select the Grass01 mesh and add a new material to it. We will call it GlassBlade01.

How to do it…

  1. In the Material node editor, add Glossy BSDF and a Mix Shader node.

  2. Mix Glossy BSDF with the default Diffuse and set the Fac to 25 percent Glossy and 75 percent Diffuse.

  3. Set the Glossy color to RGB 0.25, 0.3, 0.17 and the model to GGX.

  4. Add Texture Coordinate and an Image Texture node. Use the UV coordinates and open the grass_blade.jpg file. Connect the texture to the Color input socket of Diffuse BSDF.

  5. Add a Hue Saturation Value node and place it between the Image Texture node and Diffuse BSDF. Set Hue to 0.450, Saturation...