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 lighting


As we always do, let's start with setting up the lighting. Car rendering can be done in many different lighting conditions, but for our render, we will create a studio lighting.

Getting ready

Open the Chapter10_empty.blend file. The lighting, together with the mesh, which we will be using as the ground for the scene, is located in the second layer. Select the Emit01 mesh and add a new material to it. Name the new material Emit01.

How to do it...

  1. Delete the default Diffuse BSDF node and add Emit BSDF in its place.

  2. Set the Intensity value to 15.000.

  3. Apply the same material to the Emit02 and Emit03 meshes.

  4. Select the Emit04 mesh and add a new material in the first material slot, calling it Emit02. Also, set the Strength value to 15.000.

  5. Add Holdout BSDF (Add | Shaders) and a Mix Shader node.

  6. Connect Holdout to the first socket and Emission to the second one.

  7. Add a Geometry node (Add | Input) and connect the backface output to the Fac input of the Mix Shader node.

  8. Apply the same...