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 realism to the keys with a bump texture

In this recipe we will learn how to use bump maps to distort the surface of an object or at least create the illusion of it.

Getting ready

Now the surface of our key is reacting in a realistic way to light, but it is still missing something. Every real key has got some word or pattern on it. To obtain this effect, we are going to add a bump texture at the key material in order to add these details on the surface.

How to do it...

These are the steps we are going to follow to create the bump for our material:

Let's go to our node editor and add a new node. To do this press Shift + A and go to Inputs | Texture Coordinate. This node will allow us to tell Cycles what kind of coordinate we want to use for the textures of our material. Now we need to add an Image Texture node. We will find it in the Textures section of the Add menu. Before we start to link the nodes, we need the last one. From the Vector section of the Add menu, add a Bump node.
Now let's link the UV output from the Texture Coordinate node to the Vector input of the Image Texture node and the Color output of the latter to the Height input of the Bump node. As a last linking we need to put the Normal output of the Bump node into the Normal input of both the Diffuse BSDF and Glossy BSDF nodes. We are almost ready, as we just need to add the image that we want to use as a bump map. To do this we need to click on the open image icon in the Image Texture node. From the file browser go to the Chapter01/Blend/Textures folder and open the Key_Bump.png image.
That's it! Looking at the real-time viewport we can see the bump map doing its work on the key surface. Without changing anything of the mesh geometry we can see really fine details, affecting the way the light reacts on the surface of the key.
There is one last thing to change. The strength of the bump node is definitely too much. To adjust this, let's change the Strength value of the Bump node to 0.030.

The final node setup of the key material will look like the following screenshot:

How it works...

We used the Texture Coordinate node to tell the Image Texture node where to place the image on the surface of our key. Then with the Bump node we converted the black and white image information into vector information which is readable by the BDSFs.

When we use a bump map, Cycles will treat the surface as it would be lower in correspondence to the black areas of the image and higher in correspondence to the white ones. Of course all the grayscale in the middle will give information about the position of the surface. Taking this information in account, the BDSFs will calculate the behavior of the light bouncing on the surface of the object.

There's more...

A bump map is a black and white image which contains information about the shape of the surface of an object. It is used to add details to a mesh without actually changing the geometry of it. This means that during the rendering process, Cycles will take to account the information taken from the bump map and make the light react accordingly even if the surface is actually flat. A bump map will not change the silhouette of the object, it will just fake the details on the surface. To actually change the geometry we need to use displacement, but we will cover this technique later on in the book, in Chapter 8, Creating a Car Animation, in the Creating the materials for the exterior environment recipe.

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

Adding realism to the keys with a bump texture

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...

There's more...