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.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

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


Controlling movement of textures using individual keyframes within each texture can be time consuming, particularly when you may have several textures that need to move or scale together over time. It is possible to create a proxy object that can be animated, which in turn can control the offset, scale, and even rotation of a texture in a material.

How to do it...

Mapping material and texture settings to an object is easy in Blender especially if you use a non-renderable object like the Empty. An Empty object is one of the primary Blender objects like plane, cube, and sphere. It can be created anywhere in a scene but will never appear when rendered. Its purpose is to act as a proxy object to which renderable objects or textures can be mapped to. It is particularly useful when you want to control texture or material movement because you only have to map the material to the Empty and animate that rather than many material...