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

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Combining two materials, to make a third, using Nodes

We will create a node material made up from the three materials created in the previous recipes. One representing the base gray sandstone texture, another representing the quartz layers, and a third that will act as a mask to mix the final result.

Getting ready

To help manage material node creation, it is a good idea to rearrange the interface as shown below. This gives a large Node editing window with the Material and Texture properties conveniently on the right of the screen. It provides a camera view and an Image editor with the render result. If you don't feel confident about setting this up yourself refer to Chapter 4, Managing Blender Materials, which includes a simple recipe for creating such a view.

How to do it….

Load u p the pebble-06.blend saved at the end of the last recipe. Should you have not completed that recipe you can download it from the Packt Publishing website.

To create a node material we should have the object selected and ideally start with the main material selected. In our case, it is the Surface-Color material created at the beginning of the first recipe in this section.

With the pebble object selected change the Node type to Material in the Node editor.
Now select the Surface Color material using the Browse ID data button from the Materials panel in the header. That's the little material icon next to the material name.
This selector is the same as that in the Materials properties panel but more convenient when we are working with nodes.
Finally, select the UseNodes check-box to enable the Node editor.
A blank Material node linked to an Output node should be displayed.
In the Material node choose the SurfaceColor material created earlier.
If you render at this point the pebble would display the SurfaceColor material because that's the only node material being fed to the Output node. It's time to add our Quartz material to the node tree.
Ensure your mouse cursor is within the Node editor view and press the keyboard shortcut Shift+A, and from the displayed list add another Material node.
Depending on what node is selected, before you added this new node, Blender will attempt to make a link automatically. This may not be what you need. To remove an incorrect link, just drag the link away from the input it may have incorrectly attached to. You can learn all about node editing from the BlenderWiki.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Materials/Nodes/Usage
In this Material node, choose the Quartz material created earlier.
Press SHIFT+A and add a Mix node from the Color menu. Link the Color output socket from the SurfaceColor material node to Color1 input, and the Color output socket from the Quartz material node to Color2 input. Change the mix type to Screen.
Add a new Input/Material node, and select material QuartzMask. Connect its Color output to the Mix/Fac input node.

Save your work as pebble-07.blend and render to view your simulated quartz-veined pebble material.

How it works...

Blender Node editor is incredibly useful in combining materials in all kinds of new ways. It allows multiple materials to be combined on single objects. We have employed a simple mask here to accurately combine totally different materials onto our pebble simulation. In a sense we have created a new form of stencil to mix different textures controlled by a mask material. The difference with a node material is that the mask is much more flexible than the texture example we used in the individual materials.

Of course, that is not the only thing that material nodes can achieve. However, it is a very useful technique simply achieved using three materials and an uncomplicated mixing method.

Material nodes in Blender are one of the unique features that make it such a versatile 3D suite. Nodes can be used to create really detailed and interesting materials, something that is not possible with materials alone. We have used it here to mix two separate materials, using a third to filter the mix result. Later, we will examine more complex examples of node tree set ups. However, it's important to realize that a good node material does not have to be complex to work.

There's more...

You may have noticed that your renders are not quite the same as those illustrated in this book. That is because I have set up some variations in the lighting and rendering options to produce a better quality render. This is not necessary while you are developing a material solution as it will increase the render times for all test renders. However, if you would like to know how to duplicate the look of the renders in this chapter there is a recipe included in Chapter 4, Managing Blender Materials.

Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook

Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook

Overview of this book

Related Content you might be interested in

Current Title:

Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook

Combining two materials, to make a third, using Nodes

Getting ready

How to do it….

How it works...

There's more...

See also