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

Linking materials


Exactly as for Blender Internal, Cycles materials can be linked from libraries. Every blend file containing linkable assets can be a library.

Linking materials is really a useful practice: let's say you have 20 different blend files with objects using an iron shader, and that at a certain point of your workflow you need to modify this iron material in all the files; by having this material linked in all the 20 files from a single blend is possible to update all of them at once by modifying just one shader in one file.

How to do it...

  1. Just go to the File menu in the left part of the main header and select Link:

  2. Browse to the directory where you store your library files and select the blend file you want to link the material from (for example, try the file 1301OS_02_library.blend).

  3. Browse inside the blend structure, where the linkable assets are divided into subdirectories (shown as folders named as Scene, Mesh, Material, NodeTree, Object, and so on; note that the various folders...