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 simple glass shader


To start getting acquainted with the glass shader, we will use a simpler scene than the one we will be creating later. To get all the objects we will use now, we need to select just layers 1, 3, and 5. Layer selection area is in the lower viewport header. Now let's add a new material to the Empty_Glass object (the first glass on the right when we are in camera view) and name it Clean_Glass.

Getting ready

First of all let's open Blender and open the Glass_Empty.blend file, which you will find in the blend folder of this chapter. As we saved the user settings before, everything should be ready.

How to do it…

To create the first recipe of this chapter, we will be performing the following steps:

  1. Let's now go to the Material node editor and start creating our shader. First of all we need to delete default Diffuse BSDF and instead add Glass BSDF (Add | Shader).

  2. Let's now link it to Material Output and activate the real-time viewport. Everything is black because there are...