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

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

For our first lighting setup we will look at one of the most important and common ways of lighting: the three-point light setup. As the name suggests, this consists of three lights—the key light, the rim light, and the fill light. With different positions, colors, and intensities we can create a huge variety of moods for our image and this is why every artist should know how to set up this kind of lighting. Let's get started!

Getting ready

From the smaller viewport header, select the Display mode and from the drop-down menu, click on the Rendered mode.

Here you have it! The awesome real-time viewport. Now the scene is quite empty, so it is not so heavy and Blender should still be quite responsive. Anyway, it is up to the artist to decide when to turn the real-time viewport off if it becomes too heavy.

Tip

When we activate the real-time viewport, in the upper part of it we can see some technical info. The last one on the right is Path Tracing Samples x/x. The more samples you have, the more precise and less noisy the viewport will be. If you want to increase the samples for the viewport, go to the render settings section and under the Sampling panel, change the Preview value. Just keep in mind that higher samples also mean higher render time!

How to do it...

These are steps that we need to follow to create a three-point lighting setup:

Right now, the scene is quite dark and boring. So, let's add some light to start. Add a plane, add a material to it from the material menu, and name it Key_Light. While the node editor will be needed for the biggest part of materials, for the really basic ones it is still possible to use the old materials menu. So from the Surface panel, click on the Surface drop-down menu and select Emission. Note that a new shader node has been added in the node editor.
If you still have the real-time viewport active, you will see that the plane is emitting light. Place the light a bit above our scene and let's take some time to familiarize with it. As we said in the introduction, Cycles is able to calculate lights in a quite accurate way. Indeed, mesh lights will behave like it does in reality.
This means that increasing the surface of the emitter will increase the amount of light in the scene. At the same time, the shadows will become more blurred. On the other hand, a smaller surface will be weaker but will cast much sharper shadows.
For the mesh emitters the only possible setting is in the materials menu (or in the node editor) and is Strength. Let's give this light an emitting power of 10 and then place it a bit on the right and a bit higher than the camera, and make it face towards the center of the scene. Now set the scale to 3.
Let's copy the plane, place it on the left side of the scene, and scale it up to a value of 16. Our target is to make the shadows of this light much smoother, this being a fill light. The problem is that now its light is way too strong. By clicking on the button with the number 2 on it, which is right next to the material name, duplicate the material and name it Fill_Light and set the intensity of this material to 1. To make the scene a bit more interesting, we can add a touch of blue to the color of the light. Something like R: 0.600, G: 0.800, B: 0.800 should be fine.
Now let's duplicate the emitting plane again and move it behind the objects facing towards the camera and leave the scale as it is. Again we will have to duplicate the material and name it Rim_Light . Change the color to a really subtle yellow. Set the RGB value to 0.800, 0.770, 0.600. This small color temperature contrast will help make the scene more interesting.
There is just a small problem now. We can see our rim light in the camera, and this is not exactly what we want in a studio shot. Luckily, even if Cycles is a realistic engine, there is still a lot of room for tricks! With the rim light selected, go to the object menu and down to the Ray Visibility panel. Here uncheck the Camera checkbox and our rim light will be gone from the real-time viewport!
That's it for our three-point light setup! In the end, our scene should look more or less like this:

How it works...

As we said at the beginning of this recipe, the three-point light setup is one of the most important setups to master and one of the most commonly used. We are now going to see the concepts behind it in depth.

Key Light

This is the dominant light in the scene. This light plays the main role in determining the mood of an image and in shaping the form of subjects. It is also responsible for most of the shadows. With that said, the key light is not always the brightest one in the scene. More often than not the rim light is the brightest. On the other hand, the key light must always be brighter than the fill light. This light is usually positioned about 30 to 60 degrees to the front and to the right-hand side of the object. This is not a rule, however.

Fill Light

As the name suggests, this light fills in the shadow areas. As we said before, it is always of lesser visual intensity than the key light. The fill light is also really soft. This is because it is used to control the contrast of the image. A stronger fill light will result in a less-contrasted (and so with less visual tension) image, while a weaker fill light will leave the image with a higher contrast (and thus a more dramatic and visually tense image). In the real world, the fill light is always generated by the reflected or scattered light from where it takes its soft look. The fill light is usually positioned across from the key light, in order to better fill the shadows left by the latter. Still it should cast its light from the camera side.

Rim Light

This light is also called Backlight and its primary function is to make the subject stand out from the background. It creates a thin line of light around the shape of the subject that helps to enhance the illusion of depth and emphasize the subject. This light is positioned behind the subject, more or less opposite to the camera point of view.

The three-point light setup became so popular thanks to its versatility. Playing with the intensities, colors, and position of the lights will greatly change the mood of the image, from a happy fairy look to a dark and sinister one. A good technique is to find references from images, for example, movies, and try to recreate the look of that image. You can be sure that in almost any of the movies out there, the lighting of the subjects was done with a three-point setup.

In this link Ben Simonds will explains a lot of tips and tricks with the three-point light setup, including how to give different moods:

http://bensimonds.com/2010/06/03/lighting-tips-from-the-masters/

Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook - Second Edition

Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook - Second Edition

Overview of this book

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Current Title:

Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook - Second Edition

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

Getting ready

Tip

How to do it...

How it works...

Key Light

Fill Light

Rim Light