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

Compositing the scene


It is now time to composite the scene after rendering it.

Getting ready

After the rendering is completed, we will open up a new Blender scene and go to the node editor. Let's delete the default render layer and add an image input node (Add menu | image). Here we will load the exr image sequence that we just rendered. We need to change the mode to image sequence and set the number of frames, exactly as we did for the sea-animated texture. You will see that we now have all the sockets with the render passes that we activated before. Let's dive into the compositing process!

How to do it...

We will start by compositing the image over the sky background:

  1. From the Image output, add the following in sequence: a Glare node (Add menu | Filters), a Mix Color node, and an Alpha Over node (Add menu | colors).

  2. Set Fog Glow with Mix to 1, Threshold to 0.55 and Size to 9 and plug it in the second socket of the Mix node. Plug the original Image output into the first socket of the Mix node...