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

Adding color to the key holder

In this recipe we will learn how to use a color texture inside a material. We will also learn a really interesting technique to make the material more realistic and "live".

Getting ready

As you will have probably noticed our key holder has the shape of the Blender logo. Of course we cannot have just the shape, we need to add proper colorization!

How to do it...

To effectively use a color texture, we need to follow these steps:

First of all let's add the colors of the Blender logo to it. In the node editor add a new Image Texture node and a Texture Coordinate node. Also, for these textures we will use the UV coordinates.
Now link the Color output of the Image Texture node to the Color input of the Translucent BSDF node. It is already much better! Now we have a nice Blender logo! Some could say that we could even stop here, but let's tweak this material even further.
It would be nice to have a bit of dirt in the occluded parts of the the key holder. To obtain this kind of effect, we will be using vertex paint.
First of all let's paint the vertices of our key holder. From the lower header of the viewport, select from the Mode menu, Vertex Paint. Now our key holder will have a shadeless white color in the viewport. From the lower viewport header, in the Paint menu select Dirty Vertex Color. Looking at the viewport we can now see that the color of the key holder has changed. This function will give a black and white color to the surface of the object following things such as occlusion and topology. We could say that our key holder is a bit dirty, and this is what we wanted.
Let's see how we can use this color in our material. Go back to object mode. If we go to the Object Data menu, we will see that in the Vertex Color panel a new entry has been added. This is the color information we created a while ago. Change the name to KeyHolderDirt, and copy it (you can use Ctrl + C as in the desktop environment). Now let's go to the node editor and add an Attribute node. We can find this inside the Input section of the Add menu. Now paste within the Attribute node field the name of the vertex color with Ctrl + V and we are ready to go. The Color output of this node will now work as a texture with the information of the vertex Color.
Now let's add a Mix Color node, which can be found in the Color section of the Add menu. Take the output of the Image Texture node which was plugged in to the Translucent BSDF color input and plug it into the first Color socket of the Color Mix node. In the second socket we will plug the Color output of the Attribute node. Finally, let's change the mixing mode of the Mix node to Multiply, change the factor to 0.300, and plug the Color output to the Translucent node's Color input.
As a last touch, let's add a Gamma node (go to Add | Color) and place it between the Mix node's Color output and the Translucent BSDF node's Color input. We will use this node to lighten the overall color a bit as now it is too dark. Change the Gamma value to 0.600.
Our rubber key holder is ready!

This is how the final node setup should look like, in the following screenshot:

Before we move on to the next recipe, let's add a fast material to both the chain and the keyring. It can be the same material for both. Add a new material and name it KeyHolderChain. Now let's move for a while to the key material. In the node editor select just the two BSDFs and the relative Mix node and press Ctrl + C. Now go again to the KeyHolderChain material and in the node editor erase the default Diffuse BSDF node. Press Ctrl + V and the node that we copied before will be pasted into the node editor. We will just have to link the Mix output to the Material output and we are ready to go.

How it works...

The first part of the creation of this material follows a workflow that we already saw in the previous recipes. However, we mixed two new BSDFs. While we will have a whole chapter to talk about the Glass BSDF, let's have a look at how the Translucent BSDF works.

As we saw, a BSDF is useful to scatter light within an object. The amount of light scattered by the object depends on the color we set in the node. A totally white color will give the highest amount of light scattered through the object, while a black color means no light scattered at all.

When we used the texture and the vertex color as the input for the Translucent BSDF node's color, we not only changed the amount of light scattered, but we also changed the color of the light that scattered through the key holder.

Another important thing we learned in this material is that BSDFs have to be mixed in a different way than colors. While for BSDF we need a Mix Shader node, for the colors we have to use a normal Mix node, exactly like the one that we use in the compositing node editor. You can easily see the difference of the two nodes by the colors of the inputs and outputs. Moreover, the Color Mix node has several ways of mixing the colors.

There's more...

Vertex painting is a technique used in computer graphics to assign color information directly on the vertices of a mesh. It can be used simply to give color over a surface or as a map to achieve different effects when setting up, for instance, a material.

Tip

When you are creating a complex material, it is a good idea to check some passages with a much simpler setup. For example, if we need to check the color of some texture or the effect given by some node, we can use a temporary diffuse node. Plugging, for instance, a texture inside the color input of a Diffuse BSDF and the diffuse output directly in the Material Output node will give us a good idea of what is going on.

Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook - Second Edition

Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook - Second Edition

Overview of this book

Related Content you might be interested in

Current Title:

Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook - Second Edition

Adding color to the key holder

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more...

Tip

See also