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.

Enrico Valenza

Enrico Valenza, also known as "EnV," on the Web is an Italian freelance illustrator who mainly collaborates with publishers such as Mondadori Ragazzi and Giunti as a cover artist for science fition and fantasy books. He graduated from Liceo Artistico Statale in Verona, Italy, and was later a student of Giorgio Scarato, an illustrator and painter. When he started to work, computers weren't very common. He spent the first 15 years of his career doing illustration with traditional media, usually on cardboard. At that time, he specialized in the use of the air-graph, a technique particularly esteemed for advertisements. When the movie Jurassic Park was released, he decided to buy a computer and try out the computer graphics that everyone was talking about. Totally self-taught for what concerns the many aspects of CG, it was his encounter with the open source philosophy that actually opened up a brand new world of possibilities―Blender in particular. In 2005, Enrico won the Suzanne Award for Best Animation, Original Idea, or Story, for the movie New Penguoen 2.38. In 2006, he joined the Orange team in Amsterdam for two weeks. He helped them in finalizing the shots of Elephants Dream, the first open source animated short movie produced by the Blender Foundation. In 2007 and 2008, Enrico was the lead artist in the Peach Project team for the production of Big Buck Bunny, Blender Foundation's second open movie. In 2010 and 2011, he was the art director at CINECA in Bologna, Italy, for the Museo della Citta di Bologna project. This was the production of a stereoscopic, computer-graphics-animated documentary made in Blender explaining the history of Bologna. For Packt Publishing, Enrico is also writing Blender 2.7 3D Modeling Cookbook, which explains the complete workflow in Blender to build an animated fantasy monster. Being a Blender Certified Trainer, he often collaborates as a CG artist with production studios that decide to switch their pipeline to open source. Enrico uses Blender almost on a daily basis for his illustration work, rarely to have the illustration rendered straight by the 3D package, more often as a starting point for painting with other open source applications. He has done several presentations and workshops about Blender and its use in productions.