Book Image

Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook - Second Edition

Book Image

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.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Introduction
Index

Obtaining a dispersion effect


In this recipe we will start to dig a bit more in the endless world of possibilities that Cycles' node Shaders offers us. What we will be creating now is a dispersion effect of the glass. This is a phenomenon which happens when the light travels through certain kinds of vacuums and gets spatially separated due to the different frequency of the colors it is composed of. Probably the most famous dispersion effect in nature is the rainbow.

Getting ready

Despite this brief physical introduction, what we will be doing in Cycles is fake, but it is really believable to the eye.

To start, let's select the Glass_IcoSphere object and add a new material to it. We will name this material DispersionGlass.

How to do it

These are the steps we will follow to create the dispersion glass:

  1. In the Material node editor, add a Separate RGB node (Add | Convertor), a color Mix node (Add | Color), and Glass BSDF.

  2. Set the mode of color Mix node to Color and the fac to 0.95. Then duplicate both...