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

Adding flowers to the scene


We will now add some flowers to our scene to give some life to the grass field. We will be using instanced meshes Again, those that can be found on layer 5.

Getting ready

It is a good idea to move the sun lamp to this layer while we create the shaders for the flowers. Select the Flower01 mesh. There are already three material slots, ready and assigned to the right parts of the mesh. Select the first slot and add a new material to it. Name it Stigma.

How to do it…

Let's see how to create the shaders for the flowers.

Creating the stigma

  1. Add Image Texture and a Texture Coordinate node. Use the UV coordinates and load the Margaret.jpg file.

  2. Plug Image Texture into Diffuse BSDF color input socket. Set the Diffuse Roughness to 1.

  3. Add an RGB to BW node (Add | Converter) and a Bump node. Connect Image Texture to the RGB to BW node and the output of the latter to the Bump node Height input. Finally, connect Normal of Bump to the Normal of Diffuse BSDF input.

Creating the petal...