Book Image

Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook

By : Enrico Valenza, Ton Roosendaal
Book Image

Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook

By: Enrico Valenza, Ton Roosendaal

Overview of this book

Cycles is Blender's new, powerful rendering engine. Using practical examples, this book will show you how to create a vast array of realistic and stunning materials and texture effects using the Cycles rendering engine. Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook is a practical journey into the new and exciting Cycles rendering engine for Blender. In this book you will learn how to create a vast array of materials and textures in Cycles, including glass, ice, snow, rock, metal and water. If you want to take your 3D models to the next level, but don't know how, then this cookbook is for you! In this practical cookbook, you will learn how to create stunning materials and textures to really bring your 3D models to life! Diving deep into Cycles you will learn Cycle's node-based material system, how to set-up a 3D scene for rendering, how to create a natural and man-made materials as well as the correct organization and re-use of Cycles materials to save you time and effort. To ensure that your creations look stunning you will learn how illumination works in Cycles, improve the quality of the final render and to avoid the presence of noise and fireflies. Each chapter of Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook builds on the complexity of the last so that by the end of this book you will know how to create an impressive library of realistic-looking materials and textures.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Naming materials and textures


It is known that one of the most important things to do (working in every workflow with every 3D package) is to give all the assets proper and explicative names; that is, in our case, to the materials and to the textures.

How to do it...

  1. Start Blender, go to the File menu in the top-left corner of the screen, and choose Load Factory Setting (this is just to be sure to start with the default Blender/Cycles settings):

  2. Now, if you are in Blender Internal mode, switch to Cycles Render.

  3. Select the default Cube and go to the Material window in the Properties panel: the default cube already has a material assigned. This material has already been named by Blender itself, yes, Material:

  4. When you create a new material, for example by clicking on the + symbol on the side of the material data block (Add a new material) under the Properties panel, Blender automatically assigns a new name to this material, usually something like Material.001, Material.002, Material.003, and so...