Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook

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.

Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Introduction

Free Chapter

Key Holder and Wallet Studio Shot

Introduction

Setting up Cycles for the first run

Creating a three-point light setup in Cycles using mesh emitters

Learning environment lighting

Using the Glossy shader to create a clean metal material

Adding realism to the keys with a bump texture

Creating a rubber shader for the key holder

Adding color to the key holder

Creating a leather material for the wallet

Using the Cycles camera's depth of field

Setting the Cycles render parameters

Creating Different Glass Materials in Cycles

Introduction

Creating a simple glass shader

Creating a glass full of water

Using default Cycles caustics

Creating custom fake caustics

Creating a custom and more versatile glass shader

Creating more complex glass materials

Obtaining a dispersion effect

Creating an absorption glass shader

Creating an Interior Scene

Introduction

Creating fake portals to decrease the noise in the scene

Creating a parquet material

Creating materials for the plant in the scene

Creating a different kind of leather

Creating the materials for the lamp

Creating a carpet using hair particles

Setting up night lighting

Using IES files in Cycles

Creating an Exterior Scene

Introduction

Setting up the lighting with an external plugin

Creating the road material

Creating the grass material

Texturing the tree trunk and creating realistic leaves

Adding flowers to the scene

Creating the wood material for the table and the fence

Giving final touches to the image using render passes

Creating a Cartoonish Scene

Introduction

Setting up the environment and lighting

Creating skin, teeth, and other body parts

Creating the hair material

Creating the dress material

Compositing the scene

Creating a Toy Movie Scene

Introduction

Setting up the lighting

Creating a realistic plastic material for the characters

Creating the environment

Achieving a movie look using the compositor

Car Rendering in Cycles

Introduction

Setting up the lighting

Creating the car paint material

Creating the material for the tyres and the rims

Creating the material for headlights and other details

Compositing the scene

Creating a Car Animation

Introduction

Setting up the lighting

Creating a car paint material

Creating the materials for the exterior environment

Setting up the scene for the animation

Compositing the scene

Creating an Iceberg Scene

Introduction

Creating the ice and snow materials

Creating the sea material in Cycles

Compositing the scene

Creating Food Materials in Cycles

Introduction

Creating grapes in Cycles

Creating parmigiano cheese

Creating bread

Learning the Branched Path Tracing render

Index

Customer Reviews

5 star

4 star

3 star

2 star

1 star

Setting up Cycles for the first run

In this recipe we will see how to set up Cycles for the first run.

Getting ready

Let's open Blender and set Cycles as the rendering engine. If you are using the CPU to render, you are pretty much ready to go. If you want to use your video card, we need to change a couple of settings.

How to do it…

Let's go to File | User Preferences.... As an alternative you can use the hotkey Ctrl + Alt + U.
Let's start by going to the System tab and in the lower-left corner you will see the Compute Device setting area.
As default it is set to None, but to use your Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) device, you need to click on the CUDA button. From the drop-down menu, select your device (or devices if you have more than one card installed in your computer).
At this point you may want to save the settings. To do this, click on the Save User Settings button in the lower-left corner so that Blender remembers these settings at the next startup.
Tip
If you are working with Blender 2.66 or newer, the user settings and the startup scene are kept separate. If on the other hand you are using an older version, clicking the Save User Settings button will also save the scene that you have in the viewport at the moment, and it will become the startup scene of Blender. To save the startup scene in version 2.66 or newer, go to File | Save Startup File.
Now let's close the Blender User Preferences window and go to the Render menu bar item. From there go to the render menu and change the Device from CPU to GPU Compute.
Let's open up the keys_Empty.blend file. If we did everything correctly from the previous section, the video card settings should have remained as we set them a while ago.
Tip
Downloading the example code
You can download the example code files for all Packt books you have purchased from your account at http://www.packtpub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you.
As you can see the interface is a bit different from the default one. This is because to set up Cycles materials, we will need a node editor always open. Moreover, Cycles has a new great feature that will help us while setting up our scenes—the interactive viewport.
When the interactive viewport is on, we will see our render running in real time in the viewport; in the meantime, we can set up our lights and material.
This is why I like to have a small viewport always set on camera view to check out the scene in real time. As the rendering is quite a heavy process, if we don't have a really powerful hardware (such as a dual-video card machine), it is good to keep this window comparatively small, in order not to over charge the system.
We will use the main viewport to select and move objects around in the scene, as this operation is not so easy from the real-time viewport.
Of course the interface setup really depends on personal tastes, so feel free to change it as you like. For the sake of simplicity in this book, when explaining some passage I will refer to the interface setup you will find in the various chapter's scenes.
Well, I think that now we are really ready to set up our first Cycles scene!

Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook - Second Edition

Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook - Second Edition

Overview of this book

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Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook - Second Edition

Setting up Cycles for the first run

Getting ready

How to do it…

Tip

Tip