Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook

Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook

Overview of this book

Blender 2.5 is one of the most usable 3D suites available. Its material and texture functions offer spectacular surface creation possibilities. It can take you hours just to create basic textures and materials in Blender and when you think of creating complex materials and textures you are petrified. Imagine how you will feel when you overcome these obstacles. This book wastes no time on boring theory and bombards you with examples of ready-created materials and textures from the start, with clear instructions on how they were created, and what you can learn from them for making your own. It covers all core Blender functions you will ever need to easily create perfect simulation of objects from the simplest to the most complex ones. The book begins with recipes that show you how to create natural surface materials, including a variety of pebbles, rocks, wood, and water, as well as man-made metals, complete with rust. By utilizing some of the easiest-to-use animation tools available, you will be able to produce accurate movement in mesh objects. Familiarize yourself with a plethora of tools that will help you to effectively organize your textures and materials. You will learn how to emulate the reflective properties of natural materials and how to simulate materials such as rusted iron, which is difficult to make believable. Transparency and reflection are both tricky natural surface properties to simulate but these recipes will make it easy. Explore ways to speed up animations by using special painting techniques to significantly lower render times. By the end of the book, you will be able to simulate some of the most difficult effects to recreate in any 3D suite, such as smoke, fire, and explosions.

Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Creating Natural Materials in Blender

Introduction

Creating a realistic pebble material using procedural textures

Creating a gray limestone pebble

Creating the quartz pebble material

Creating an opalescent quartz material

Creating a mask to represent the quartz veins

Combining two materials, to make a third, using Nodes

Creating a large rock material using procedural, and node textures

Creating a sea rock material

Creating a texture node to simulate seaweed at the base of a rock

Creating a large rock face using photo reference

Creating Man-made Materials

Introduction

Creating a slate roof node material that repeats but with ultimate variety

Using a tileable texture to add complexity to a surface

Warping a texture to disguise seams in a repeated texture

Adding weathering by copying and reusing textures

Combining materials using nodes

Creating metals

Using specular maps to add age and variety to man-made surface materials

Adding oxidization weathering to our copper material

Adding grime and artistic interest to our copper material

Creating a path or road material that never repeats

Repeating a tiled texture to duplicated objects

Deforming materials and textures in Blender

Creating Animated Materials

Introduction

How to move textures and create animation without moving a mesh

Manipulating the F-Curves of texture movement

Using an Empty as a dummy object to control texture movement over time

A barber pole with no moving parts

How to alter the color of materials and textures over time

Creating a red hot iron bar

How to animate transparency in a texture

Creating a burning sheet of paper

How to change textures during an animation

How to texture with movies creating a TV screen

Managing Blender Materials

Introduction

Setting a default scene for materials creation

Additional settings for default scene

Creating an ideal Blender interface for material creation

Creating an ideal texture animation setup

Naming materials and textures

Appending materials

Linking materials

Making blendfiles stand alone

Creating More Difficult Man-made Materials

Introduction

Creating rust on iron-based metals

Creating a mesh object to provide good reflective surfaces

Using environment map textures to simulate reflection

Varying environment map reflections to simulate corrosion or wear

Using raytrace reflections to simulate polished metals

Varying raytrace reflections to simulate dirt and grime

Creating More Difficult Natural Materials

Introduction

Creating realistic large-scale water in Blender 2.5

Setting up an ocean vista environment

Creating a wave surface using textures

Creating an ocean surface material

Creating wake around objects in water

Creating a non-repeating leaf material

Creating image and bump maps, with alpha channels

Using images as the basis for a leaf material

Using alpha to create a leaf shape on a simple mesh

Adding a non-repeating bump to the leaf material

Adding color complexity to the leaf material

UV Mapping and Sub Surface Scattering

Introduction

Creating a face map from photographs

Unwrapping a face mesh to produce a UV map

Editing a UV map to optimize the image space

Creating multiple UV maps for a single object

Combining UV maps to create an enveloping UV

Using a paint package to merge UV maps

Extracting color, bump, and specularity maps from photographs

Applying UVs to create an accurate skin material

Skin shading using SSS and AO

Painting and Modifying Image Textures in Blender

Introduction

Post processing rendered images from within Blender

Adding more than one material to a surface

Adding dirt onto a model

Creating an aged photo with simple Blender materials

Special Effects Materials

Introduction

Creating explosive smoke in Blender

Igniting a flame and making things burn in Blender

Creating loopable fire and smoke sequences

Adding complex FX without the render overhead

Index

Customer Reviews

5 star

4 star

3 star

2 star

1 star

Introduction

The surface of a natural material may seem one of the easiest to reproduce in a 3D suite such as Blender. However, natural surfaces can be quite complex in their appearance. Color, specularity, and reflection can organically change across a surface as a result of location, climate interaction, and variations in the natural substance. In many ways simulating natural objects in Blender will require more complex materials and textures than man-made objects to make them look convincing. Fortunately, learning how to create believable natural surface materials will help you in the development of many other material types. After all, most manufactured objects are created from, or based on, natural materials.

Blender offers a vast array of material and texture tools to aid you in the creation of natural-looking surfaces. Because of this there are many ways to produce similar, and equally pleasing, results. However, there are approaches that will speed material creation and make the process easier, adaptable, and more enjoyable.

Although there are no prerequisites to using the recipes for this first chapter it would be useful for you to know how Blender materials are organized and the various methods of mapping them to mesh objects. If these concepts are unfamiliar, or new to you, visit the free support documentation at the BlenderWiki: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Main_Page

At the time of writing most of this documentation is based on prior versions of Blender. However, I can recommend the Blender Summer of Documentation section on Materials and Procedural Textures written by me in 2006.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Tutorials/Materials/BSoD

Although utilizing images from the 2.49 series of Blender it still covers many of the basic principles of material creation.

This book, however, will take you beyond the basics and into the new Blender v2.5 materials and textures interface.

Good observation will be your greatest asset

When trying to simulate any surface, your eyes will be your greatest asset. Carefully observing either the real material, or good reference photos, will make the task of simulation in Blender much easier. This is particularly important with natural materials, which have complex structures giving fine variation in surface color, specularity, and texture. Understanding what these details are will make any material simulation easier and give the viewer the correct visual clues so that they know what they are meant to be looking at. Even if you intend to represent a surface in a non-photo-realistic manner it is important to provide the viewer with some essential surface properties that will give them the visual essence of a surface.

The good thing is that natural materials are usually easy to study because we can pick them up around us. If the natural object you are trying to create isn't at hand, then use the Internet to look for photo references.

http://images.google.co.uk

http://uk.images.search.yahoo.com

http://www.flickr.com/photos/

Alternatively, try to take your own photo reference shots by carrying a digital camera around with you. Even a mobile phone camera can be good enough to take reference photos.

Another useful tool is a magnifying lens. Being able to closely study the real surface that you are trying to simulate, can aid your perception of the detailed color variations and surface texture of a natural object. Just using your eyes should give you enough information about a natural surface to enable you to simulate it in Blender.

It is also a good idea to set up the default scene in Blender to provide better lighting for material and texture creation. You will need to regularly render the objects you are creating textures for, just to see a more accurate example of a materials effect. Improving the lighting, from that given in the factory settings, will aid you in that process.

You will find a recipe in Chapter 4, Setting a default scene for materials creation, that provides a better materials setup.

Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook

Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook

Overview of this book

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Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook

Introduction

Good observation will be your greatest asset