Blender Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook, Third Edition

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

About This Book

• Create realistic material shaders by understanding the fundamentals of material creation in Cycles
• Quickly make impressive projects production-ready using the Blender rendering engine
• Discover step-by-step material recipes with complete diagrams of nodes

Who This Book Is For

This book is aimed at those familiar with the basics of Blender, looking to delve into the depths of the Cycles rendering engine to create an array of breath-taking materials and textures.

What You Will Learn

• Create a basic Cycles material by mixing the shader components
• Connect nodes of different kinds to build more advanced materials
• Add node-based textures to the shaders
• Create both simple and complex materials following step-by-step recipes
• Switch the shader components easily 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 world global illumination

In Detail

Blender is the graphics software of choice for designers and media professionals alike. This book will teach you how to utilize the power of the Blender 2.7 series to create a wide variety of materials, textures, and effects with the Cycles rendering engine. You will learn about node-based shader creation, and master cycles through step-by-step, recipe-based advice. With this book, you will start small by rendering the textures of stones and water, then scale things up to massive landscapes of mountains and oceans. You will then learn how to create the look of different artificial materials such as plastic, carpenter wood, and metal, and utilize volumetric shaders to create the effects of smoke, clouds, and subsurface scattering effects of skin. You will also learn how illumination works in Cycles, improvising the quality of the final render, and how to avoid the presence of noise and fireflies. By the end, you will know how to create an impressive library of realistic-looking materials and textures.