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

Compositing the scene


The materials for our scene are ready, but we still need to make the final touches before we can call it ready. To do this, we will do some compositing.

Getting ready

Before we start, we need to activate the Mist layer in the Layer menu, which is right next to the Rendering menu. Here, we need to check the Mist option along with the various available passes. Once the option is active, a new Mist panel will appear in the World tab. Here, we can set the options of Mist, but for this scene the default options will be good. Now, let's move to the node editor and click on the Compositing button.

How to do it...

To composite the scene, we need to perform the following steps:

  1. Add an Image node by navigating to Add menu | Input, and load the sky.jpg file. After that, add a HueSaturationValue node and set the Saturation value to 0.800.

  2. Add a Mix node, plug the HueSaturationValue node into the first Image socket, and set the second Image socket's Color to RGB 0.38, 0.59, 0.71. Leave...