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 an opalescent quartz material

Quartz is a crystal and as a result tends to spread any light falling on it, producing a kind of opalescence that almost makes the surface glow. We can add additional textures, to our previously created quartz material, to recreate this opalescence thus producing a third pebble material.

Getting ready

If you have created the previous recipe, reload the pebble-04.blend blendfile. You can also download a pre-created file from the Packt Publishing website.

How to do it

With the pebble-04.blend open reselect the pebble mesh object and move to the Texture panel. Rather than creating an entirely new material from scratch we will amend the quartz material created in the last recipe. However, you will see later that you will still have access to that other pebble material for use in any Blender project.

Select the second of the QuartzMusgrave textures and in the Influence tab, select Stencil.
Select the next empty texture slot and choose New and name the texture Opalescence. Make it Type Clouds. Set Hard, Size 0.03, Depth 6.
Under Influence select Color and set to 1.00, and select Emit and set to 1.00. Set the Blend type to Mix with the color selector set to R 1.000, G 0.730, and B 0.160.

Ensure that you save the blendfile, incrementing the filename to pebble-05.blend.

These three simple steps modify the material to produce quite a difference in the quartz simulation.

How it works

When we added the stencil setting to the QuartzMusgrave, we had two stencil textures, now limiting the effect of the last texture slot that we named Opalescence.

Stencil is one of the most underrated of the Blender material tools, providing a means of controlling where textures are applied to a surface. It will be used many times in the recipes of this book.

Note

There is one disadvantage to this method of stenciling one texture after another. Once a stencil has been set all following textures will be affected within the material. You cannot turn it off in later textures, so that it no longer has an effect. That means you will have to think carefully about where within a material you set any stencil. There are techniques using Node materials that can be applied to circumvent this problem.

The last texture in the quartz material we called is Opalescence and if you examine its Influence settings you will observe that not only Color has been set but also Emit.

Emit is an unusual setting in that it controls how the texture will cause the surface to self illuminate. That does not mean it behaves like a light. It will not illuminate anything else. It just partially makes the surface shadeless, varied by the texture that controls it.

Note

Blender 2.5 introduces a new texture influence called indirect lighting. It also employs the Emit influence. However, objects and textures can directly illuminate the surrounding scene. Although that type of physical simulation is beyond the scope of this book, it does provide increased methods of simulating illuminated surfaces.

Why use Emit here? Well, some materials are quite difficult to simulate because of the way light spreads through the surface. Quartz has a generally white but translucent surface that spreads through the material. This is often called Sub Surface Scattering. Blender has very good sub-surface scattering controls but these can be render-intensive to use for all materials. This Emit trick can be used with very little overhead on render time and therefore is worth using in our example. However, use it with caution if your object is meant to be seen in different light levels, especially an animated change in illumination, as the surface may give the impression of glowing under certain low light conditions.

Note

We will meet the Blender Sub Surface Scattering controls in later recipes.

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 an opalescent quartz material

Getting ready

How to do it

How it works

Note

Note

Note