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

Creating the quartz pebble material

Quartz is an extremely common type of stone that is usually layered inbetween other rock types. However, pebbles on beaches where this type of rock is common often break off from the layers and are tossed in the sea to form pebbles. The second pebble we will create is based on such a variety of rock.

Getting ready

If you have completed the previous recipe load up the saved pebble-03.blend file.

Alternatively, you can download a pre-created file from the following location the Packt Publishing website.

How to do it

Let's create a new material to represent the quartz pebble. To do so we need to have the pebble object selected and temporarily unlink the Surface-Color material, giving a clean surface upon which to design our quartz material. However, once you unlink a material from an object it will only be available for reuse during your current working session. As soon as you close that Blendfile, even if you have saved it, the material will be lost. Blender normally only saves materials assigned to objects. However, we can fix a material or texture by clicking the F button to the right of the material or texture name.

With the pebble object selected click the F button, next to the material name in the Material properties panel, to fix the material into the blendfile. Then click the X button to unlink it from the Materials panel.

If you hover over X it will display unlink datablock. You will notice that if you Shift-click the X you will permanently remove the material the next time you save. So be careful as we only want to temporarily remove the link to our Surface-Color material, while we create the quartz material.

Click the New tab to create a new blank material and name it Quartz.
We can keep all the default material properties set apart from the Diffuse color. So change this to pure white or RGB 1.00.
Switch to the Textures panel and add a new texture of Type Clouds and name it QuartzClouds.
Under the Clouds tab set Grayscale and Soft, Size to 0.36, and Depth to 2.0.
Under Influence only have Normal selected and set to -1.00 and under Blend type Screen. Select RGB to Intensity, Negative, and Stencil. Also check Old Bump mapping. Finally, change the color selector to R, G, B 0.700.
That has created a slight bump map to the texture and a stencil, of which only some of the following textures will appear through.
In the Texture properties select the next free texture slot and create a new texture of type Musgrave, and name it QuartzMusgrave.
Under the Musgrave tab set the type to Multifractal, and Basis Voronoi F1 with Size 0.05.
Under the Colors tab set Adjust/ Brightness to 0.467 and Contrast to 5.000.
Under Influence select Diffuse Color set to 1.00 and Geometry Normal to 10.00. Set the Blend type to Screen and adjust the color picker to R and G to 0.84 and B to 0.68. Also select Old Bump Mapping.
This will give a weathered and slightly dirty appearance to our quartz material. The quartz in the pebble example is contaminated with other rock fragments. Something that only becomes apparent when you look through a magnifying lens at the real material. If you were to render at this point, then you have a texture that could be used as a pebble material as it is. But we can take it further by varying the worn surface across the pebble.
Select an empty texture slot below the QuartzMusgrave texture. However, rather than creating a new texture we will load up the same QuartzMusgrave texture into the new slot but make some modifications to how it is used in our material.
Select the checkered icon that precedes the texture name shown in the following screenshot:
From the displayed list select QuartzMusgrave. The number 2 should appear just past the texture name to show that this texture is used twice.
Under Influence and Geometry change the Normal value to 5.00, the Blend value to Screen, and change the color selector to black (RGB values to 0.00).

Save your work so far, incrementing the filename to pebble-04.blend, and perform a test render.

We have produced a surf-damaged pebble showing the effect of being crashed across other pebbles as the tide ebbs and flows.

How it works

The second material that we created was to simulate the quartz veins in the pebble. Each of the textures used in this material produce a surface, in much the same way as the first. Procedural textures vary in the surface color and normals (bump) to produce the desired effect. However, there are several special techniques used that are worth highlighting as they can add a little bit of magic to a surface simulation task.

The first texture is named QuartzClouds and this has only been used to influence the normal of the material. However, you will notice that under the Influence/Blend setting Negative, RGB to Intensity, and Stencil have all been checked.

Negative will reverse the effect of the texture. This is an overall setting and any of the set influences will be affected. In our case only normal is set.
RGB to Intensity will internally convert the image to grayscale, so that only those intensity values affect any of the other influence settings. If the color intensity had been set the default magenta color would have been mixed with the material color based on the proportions of gray in the texture. We can therefore even add color with a black and white texture. In our case color influence is not used so we can ignore this effect. However, although the default color is magenta we can alter this color using the color picker within the Influence tab.
Stencil creates a mask, or stencil, to filter all following textures in the material.

However, Stencil will only work if RGB to Intensity is set, even if it's just a grayscale texture, such as cloud.

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

Creating the quartz pebble material

Getting ready

How to do it

How it works