Blender 2.6 Cycles:Materials and Textures Cookbook

Over 40 recipes to help you create stunning materials and textures using the Cycles rendering engine with Blender

Overview

• Create naturalistic materials and textures – such as rock, snow, ice and fire – using Cycles
• Learn Cycle’s node-based material system
• Get to grips with the powerful Cycles rendering engine

In Detail

Cycles is Blender’s new, powerful rendering engine. Using practical examples, this book will show you how to create a vast array of realistic and stunning materials and texture effects using the Cycles rendering engine.

Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook is a practical journey into the new and exciting Cycles rendering engine for Blender. In this book you will learn how to create a vast array of materials and textures in Cycles, including glass, ice, snow, rock, metal and water. If you want to take your 3D models to the next level, but don’t know how, then this cookbook is for you!

In this practical cookbook, you will learn how to create stunning materials and textures to really bring your 3D models to life! Diving deep into Cycles you will learn Cycle’s node-based material system, how to set-up a 3D scene for rendering, how to create a natural and man-made materials as well as the correct organization and re-use of Cycles materials to save you time and effort.

To ensure that your creations look stunning you will learn how illumination works in Cycles, improve the quality of the final render and to avoid the presence of noise and fireflies. Each chapter of Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook builds on the complexity of the last so that by the end of this book you will know how to create an impressive library of realistic-looking materials and textures.

What you will learn from this book

• Create a basic Cycles material mixing the closure components
• Connect nodes of different kinds to build more advanced materials
• Add node-based textures to the shaders
• Create simple and complex materials such as glass, stone, fire and ice
• Switch shader components without affecting a possibly complex network of links
• Parent and rename the nodes to better organize the “Node Editor” window
• Build material interfaces for general use in complex materials by grouping the shaders inside groups
• Set-up light-sources and the “World” Global Illumination

Approach

Written in a friendly, practical style this Cookbook deep-dives into a wide-array of techniques used to create realistic materials and textures.

Who this book is written for

This book is perfect for you if you have used Blender before but are new to the impressive Cycles renderer. You should have some knowledge of the Blender interface, though this is not a strict requirement. If you want to create realistic, stunning materials and textures using Cycles, then this book is for you!

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Overview of Materials in Cycles
Chapter 2: Managing Cycles Materials
Chapter 3: Creating Natural Materials in Cycles
Chapter 4: Creating Man-made Materials in Cycles
Chapter 5: Creating Complex Natural Materials in Cycles
Chapter 6: Creating More Complex Man-made Materials
Chapter 7: Creating Organic Materials