Book Image

Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook

Book Image

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.

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Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook
Jan, 2011 | 312 pages
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Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook
Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Creating Natural Materials in Blender
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
2
Creating Man-made Materials
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
3
Creating Animated Materials
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
4
Managing Blender Materials
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
5
Creating More Difficult Man-made Materials
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
6
Creating More Difficult Natural Materials
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
7
UV Mapping and Sub Surface Scattering
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
8
Painting and Modifying Image Textures in Blender
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
9
Special Effects 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
Index

Using a tileable texture to add complexity to a surface

We will use the tileable texture created in the previous recipe and apply it to a slate roof material in Blender.

  1. Reload the slate-roof-01.blend file saved earlier and select the roof mesh object.

  2. From the Materials panel, create a new material and name it slate-roof. In the Diffuse tab, set the color selector to R 0.250, G 0.260, and B 0.300.

  3. Under Specular tab, change the specular type to Wardiso, with Intensity to 0.400 and Slope to 0.300. The color should stay at the default white.

That's set the general color and specularity for the first material that we will use to start a node material solution for our slate roof shader.

  1. Ensure you have a Node Editor window displayed.

    Tip

    Chapter 4 shows you how to set up a really useful range of Blender windows to make material creation much easier.

  2. In the Node Editor, select the material node button and check the Use Nodes checkbox.

  3. A blank material node should be displayed connected to an output...

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