Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook

If you're already au fait with Blender, this book gives extra power to your artist's elbow with a fantastic grounding in Cycles. Packed with tips and recipes, it makes light work of the toughest concepts.

Overview

• Get acquainted with the lighting and rendering concepts of the Blender Cycles engine
• Learn the concepts behind nodes shader system and get the best out of Cycles in any situation
• Packed with illustrations and a lot of tips and tricks to make your scenes come to life

In Detail

Blender provides a broad spectrum of modeling, texturing, lighting, animation and video post-processing functionality in one package. It provides cross-platform interoperability, extensibility and a tightly integrated workflow. Blender is one of the most popular Open Source 3D graphics applications in the world.

Modern GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit) have some limitations for rendering complex scenes. This is mainly because of limited memory, and interactivity issues when the same graphics card is also used for displaying and rendering frames. This is where Cycles rendering engine comes into play. Cycles is bundled as an add-on with Blender. Some of the features of Cycles is its quality, speed and having integrated industry standard libraries.

This book will show you how to carry out your first steps in Cycles - a brand new rendering engine for Blender. In a gradual and logical way, you will learn how to create complex shaders and lighting setups to face any kind of situation that you may find in Computer Graphics.

This book provides information on how to setup your first application in Cycles. You will start by adding lights, materials, and textures to your scene. When it's time for the final render, you will see how to setup Cycles in the best way. You will learn about a wide variety of materials, lighting, techniques, tips, and tricks to get the best out of Cycles. Further on in the book, you will get to know about animation and still shots, and learn how to create advanced materials for realistic rendering, as well cartoon style shaders.

This cookbook contains a wide range of different scenes, proposed in a structured and progressive order. During this journey, you will get involved in the concepts behind every step you take in order to really master what you learn.

What you will learn from this book

• Understand how to use the node editor
• Learn to create your first material in Cycles
• Light a scene in Cycles
• Deal with animations in Cycles
• Design complex shaders and lighting setups
• Get the best out of your renders thanks to Cycles render passes
• Create complex realistic shaders using advanced techniques

Approach

An in-depth guide full of step-by-step recipes to explore the concepts behind the usage of Cycles. Packed with illustrations, and lots of tips and tricks; the easy-to-understand nature of the book will help the reader understand even the most complex concepts with ease.

Who this book is written for

If you are a digital artist who already knows your way around Blender, and you want to learn about the new Cycles' rendering engine, this is the book for you. Even experts will be able to pick up new tips and tricks to make the most of the rendering capabilities of Cycles.