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

Creating a realistic plastic material for the characters


We will now recreate the material from which the characters are made. It will be a plain plastic material and we will apply some textures on it.

Getting ready

Generally, each character will have three different materials—one for the face, one for the chest, and one for the rest of the body. The plastic of these materials will be very similar, if not the same, but we will be applying the different textures and colors that belong to the different characters.

How to do it...

Let's get started by selecting the Soldiers mesh and adding a new material in the first material slot. Name it Soldiers.

Creating the material for the soldier's face

Following are the steps for creating the material for the soldier's face:

  1. Add a Glossy BSDF node and mix it with the default Diffuse BSDF node using a Mix Shader node.

  2. Leave the Color value to default and set the Glossy node's Roughness to 0.003.

  3. Add a Fresnel node by navigating to Add | Inputs and plug it into...