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 alpha to create a leaf shape on a simple mesh


Blender is equipped to deal with alpha channel images, using them to produce visual holes in any surface. In order to use this image transparency, there are a few important steps to follow.

Getting started

You will need the blendfile saved at the end of the last exercise: ivy-leaf-03.blend. If you starting this recipe from scratch you can download and unzip the following file from the Packtpub website: chapt-06/ivy-leaf.zip

How to do it…

Blender provides all the tools necessary to use alpha channels. You will need to open ivy-leaf-03.blend to continue this recipe.

  1. With the plane selected, switch to the Materials panel if it's not already active.

  2. Select and check the Transparency tab. Select the Z transparency button and turn down Specular to 0.000. Leave Alpha at 1.00.

    Note

    The reason we are using Z Transparency rather than Raytrace is because it is so much faster. Raytrace rendering will increase the render times exponentially. On my system,...