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Photorealistic Materials and Textures in Blender Cycles

Photorealistic Materials and Textures in Blender Cycles

By : Arijan Belec
4.5 (15)
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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)
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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

Generating Normal maps in GIMP

We will now learn to quickly convert Albedo maps into Normal maps in GIMP. This will allow us to turn any image texture into a Normal map in a few clicks.

In the following steps, we will export a texture as a Normal map:

  1. Open the Albedo map in GIMP.
Figure 5.39 – Opening an Albedo map in GIMP

Figure 5.39 – Opening an Albedo map in GIMP

  1. Open the Filters menu from the top of the window, find the Generic section, and click on Normal Map.
Figure 5.40 – Applying a Normal Map filter

Figure 5.40 – Applying a Normal Map filter

GIMP will instantly turn the image into a Normal map and offer some tools to adjust the image, as shown in Figure 5.41. You can tweak the settings, but applying the default settings usually works well.

  1. Click the OK button.
Figure 5.41 – Confirming the conversion

Figure 5.41 – Confirming the conversion

  1. Once again, export the image, and name the file Normal_Map.png.
Figure 5.42 – Exporting the Normal map

Figure 5.42 –...

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