Sign In Start Free Trial
Account

Add to playlist

Create a Playlist

Modal Close icon
You need to login to use this feature.
  • Book Overview & Buying Photorealistic Materials and Textures in Blender Cycles
  • Table Of Contents Toc
  • Feedback & Rating feedback
Photorealistic Materials and Textures in Blender Cycles

Photorealistic Materials and Textures in Blender Cycles

By : Arijan Belec
4.5 (15)
close
close
Photorealistic Materials and Textures in Blender Cycles

Photorealistic Materials and Textures in Blender Cycles

4.5 (15)
By: Arijan Belec

Overview of this book

Blender is one of the most versatile tools in the 3D software industry, and with a growing audience and constantly expanding set of features, it has become more powerful, useful, and in demand than ever before. This updated fourth edition of Photorealistic Materials and Textures in Blender Cycles is an all-inclusive guide to procedural texturing, rendering, and designing materials in Blender, covering all aspects of the 3D texturing workflow. The book begins by introducing you to Blender’s material nodes and material property functions, and then helps you create photorealistic textures by understanding texture maps and mapping them to 3D models. As you advance, you’ll learn to design high-quality environments and lighting using HDRIs and Blender’s lighting options. By exploring, breaking down, and studying the underlying mechanics that allow you to develop these elements, you’ll create any material, texture, or environment and use it to improve your artwork and present them in a professional way. Finally, you’ll discover how to correctly set up scenes and render settings, and get to grips with the key elements of achieving realism. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a solid understanding of materials, textures, shading, lighting, rendering, and all the critical aspects of achieving the highest quality with your 3D artwork.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
close
close
Free Chapter
1
Part 1: Materials in Cycles
5
Part 2: Understanding Realistic Texturing
9
Part 3: UV Mapping and Texture Painting
14
Part 4: Lighting and Rendering

Baking Normal maps in Blender

We will now learn to bake normal maps in Blender using the Cycles render engine. Baking is the process of saving attributes such as color, roughness, or even bumpiness into an image that can be exported or used elsewhere. The features on the surface in Figure 5.17 can be baked into a normal map image so that it can be used to simulate the same features, without actually creating them as a 3D surface. This method will allow us to simulate highly detailed surfaces without increasing the polygon count of our scene.

Figure 5.17 – Surface details

Figure 5.17 – Surface details

These features are easy to replace with a normal map because they are quite close to the surface, and they appear as bumps rather than separate objects. In the following steps, we will turn these surface details into a normal map:

  1. Add a plane right above the surface with the details.
Figure 5.18 – Adding a plane above the surface with details

Figure 5.18 – Adding a plane above the surface with...

Unlock full access

Continue reading for free

A Packt free trial gives you instant online access to our library of over 7000 practical eBooks and videos, constantly updated with the latest in tech
bookmark search playlist font-size

Change the font size

margin-width

Change margin width

day-mode

Change background colour

Close icon Search
Country selected

Close icon Your notes and bookmarks

Delete Bookmark

Modal Close icon
Are you sure you want to delete it?
Cancel
Yes, Delete

Confirmation

Modal Close icon
claim successful

Buy this book with your credits?

Modal Close icon
Are you sure you want to buy this book with one of your credits?
Close
YES, BUY