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

Extracting color, bump, and specularity maps from photographs


The last recipe demonstrated how to create a color map that can be accurately UV-mapped around a complex model of a human head. We could just take that color map and apply it in a simple material. However, in real life, the human face has many more surface irregularities than just color. If you examine your own face, you will see that veins, hair sockets, and smile line creases add detail to show what kind of a person you are. Likewise, your skin will reflect light more on those areas of your face that are wetter than others. This natural sweat will vary across the face, not only explaining the environment or temperature, but also what you may have been doing like running or resting. Adding maps to control these material attributes will help add detail to convince the viewer they are looking at human skin rather than plastic painted as skin.

Creating bump, specular, and shading maps is not as difficult as it sounds. We can use...