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 sea material in Cycles


Although we've already created some sea material, this one is going to be something new. While the other sea materials were just a mix of reflective and refractive shaders, now we are going to try to mimic a real mass of water, where the color and the roughness of the refraction changes with the change of the depth. To obtain such an effect in computer graphics the most useful thing would be volumetrics. This, for now, is not yet implemented in Cycles, so we will have to fake it. Anyway, as we've already learned, cheating is quite normal while creating 3D graphic scenes, and the result will be great anyway! Let's get started.

Getting ready

Select the sea mesh and add a new material to it. Name it sea.

How to do it…

To create the sea material, follow the ensuing steps:

  1. Let's add a Refraction BSDF node and a Glossy BSDF node and mix them together using a Mix Shader node, with Refraction to the first socket and the Glossy to the second one. As input for the Fac...