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

Setting up the environment and lighting


The first thing that we will do is setting up the lighting. We will be using a combination of the sunlight and environment lighting.

Getting ready

Let's open the chapter05_empty.blend file. As you can see, this time the interface is slightly different than usual. Due to the nature of the image, a vertical layout should be better for this particular scene. We will start by setting up the lighting and the materials for the environment.

How to do it…

To create the various materials, we will be performing the following steps:

Lighting and render settings

  1. Add a Sun light and place it behind the camera. The direction has to be similar to the camera's, but the angle to the ground shall be bigger.

  2. Set Color to RGB 1, 0.98, 0.9 and the Strength value to 3.500.

  3. Make sure that the Shadows are active and set the Size value to 0.050.

  4. Go to the World tab and set Color to Sky Texture. Set the sphere lighting so that it comes from the top left, as shown in the following screenshot...