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

Creating a sand material using procedural textures


In this recipe, we will create a sand material, good for close objects as for distant ones:

Getting ready

To get ready, start Blender and switch to Cycles. Delete the default cube and add a plane. In the edit mode, scale it nine times bigger (18 units per side).

  1. Go to the World window and click on Use Nodes, then click on the little square with a dot on the right-hand side of the color slot. From the menu, select Sky Texture. Set the Strength value to 0.300.

  2. Select the lamp and go to the lamp's Object Data window and click on Use Nodes. Then change the Lamp type to Sun and set the Size value to 0.100 and the Strength value to 2.000. Change the light's color to R 1.000, G 0.782, B 0.310. In an orthogonal top view, rotate the Sun lamp to 45°.

  3. Place the camera to have a nice angle on the plane and switch the 3D view to a Camera view (press 0 from numpad).

  4. Add a cube and a UV Sphere to the scene and place them leaning on the plane.

  5. Select the cube...