Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook: Over 40 recipes to help you create stunning materials and textures using the Cycles rendering engine with Blender

280 Pages·2013·10.64 MB·English

by  Enrico Valenza

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Blender 2.6 Cycles:
Materials and
Textures Cookbook
Over 40 recipes to help you create stunning materials and
textures using the Cycles rendering engine with Blender
Enrico Valenza
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
www.it-ebooks.info
Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures
Cookbook
Copyright © 2013 Packt Publishing
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First published: June 2013
Production Reference: 1180613
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
Livery Place
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Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-78216-130-1
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Enrico Valenza ([email protected])
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Credits
Author Project Coordinator
Enrico Valenza Arshad Sopariwala
Reviewers Proofreaders
Ken Beyer Claire Cresswell-Lane
Darrin Lile Mario Cecere
Acquisition Editors Indexer
Sam Birch Tejal R. Soni
Sarah Cullington
Production Coordinator
Andrew Duckworth
Nilesh R. Mohite
Lead Technical Editor
Cover Work
Arun Nadar
Nilesh R. Mohite
Technical Editors
Sumedh Patil
Dominic Pereira
Pragati Singh
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About the Author
Enrico Valenza, also known on the Web as "EnV", is an Italian freelance illustrator, mainly
collaborating with publishers, such as Mondadori Ragazzi and Giunti, as a cover artist for sci-fi
and fantasy books.
He graduated at Liceo Artistico Statale in Verona (Italy) and later was a student of illustrator
and painter Giorgio Scarato.
When he started to work, computers weren't that popular among the masses, and he
spent the first 15 years of his career doing illustrations with traditional media, usually on
cardboards. Particularly, he specialized in the use of the air-graph, a technique particularly
esteemed for advertising work.
But this was only until the moment Jurassic Park came to the theaters: he then decided to
buy a computer and try his hand at this "computer graphic" thing everyone was talking about.
Totally self-taught in the many aspects of CG, it was his encounter with the open source
philosophy that actually opened a brand new world of possibilities—in particular, Blender.
In 2005, he won the Suzanne Awards for "Best animation, original idea, and story" with the
animation New Penguoen 2.38.
In 2006, he joined the Orange Team for the last two weeks of production in Amsterdam, to
help in finalizing the shots of the first open source CG-animated short movie produced by the
Blender Foundation, named Elephants Dream.
From 2007 to 2008, he was a Lead Artist in the Peach Project Team for the production of Big
Buck Bunny, the Blender Foundation's second open movie.
From 2010 to 2011, he was an Art Director at CINECA (Bologna, Italy) for the Museo della
Città di Bologna project, that is, the production of a stereoscopic CG-animated documentary
made in Blender and explaining Bologna's history.
Being also a Blender Certified Trainer, he collaborates as a CG artist with Italian production
studios that have decided to switch their pipeline to the open source.
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He uses Blender almost on a daily basis for his illustration jobs, rarely to have the illustration
rendered straight by the 3D package, more often as a starting point for painting over with
other open source applications such as The Gimp or, more recently, MyPaint.
He has presented several presentations and workshops about Blender and its use
in productions.
I would like to say thanks to my family: my father Giuseppe and my mother
Licia, for giving me the possibility to follow what I always thought was my
path in life, my wonderful wife Micaela and my beautiful daughter Sara, just
for being there and encouraging me while writing this book.

Then, I would like to thank, obviously, Ton Roosendaal for creating Blender
and Brecht Van Lommel for Cycles. I would also like to thank all the
blender-heads at the BlenderArtist and at the Kino3d forums for all the
testing, experimentations, explanations, and examples about the Cycles
features and materials creation that were (and still are) often posted almost
at the same time they are implemented in the software. Especially on
BlenderArtist.org, there is a very long and informative thread at this
address, which, at this moment, has already reached 540 pages:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?216113-
Brecht-s-easter-egg-surprise-Modernizing-shading-and-
rendering

And another one at this address, which is already more than 200
pages long:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?216866-
Cycles-tests-the-new-blender-CPU-GPU-renderer-of-
awesomeness
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About the Reviewers
Ken Beyer is a Blender Foundation Certified Trainer, and at KatsBits.com has been
providing tutorials, training, downloads, and other information and resources on using Blender
for content creation and production relative to games and other real-time interactive products
to hobbyists, amateur artists, Indie developers, and small studios for nearly 15 years.
KatsBits.com itself is a site and community dedicated to making game content and general
game development using Blender 3D, where members can post questions, comments, and
read information important for taking that next step from "gamer" to "creator".
He has served as a Technical Reviewer on (both full and partial reviews) the following books:
f Blender 2.5 Hotshot (Packt Publishing, 2011)
f Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook (Packt Publishing, 2011)
f Blender 3D 2.49 Architecture, Buildings and Scenery (Packt Publishing, 2010)
f Blender 2.5 Lighting and Rendering (Packt Publishing, 2010)
Darrin Lile is an animator, writer, and full-time faculty member in the Media Arts and
Animation Program at The Art Institute of Wisconsin. He teaches courses in computer
animation, including Principles of 3D Modeling, Materials and Lighting, Advanced Lighting
and Texturing, and Advanced Modeling and Animation. He received Bachelor's and Master's
degrees in Film and Media Studies from the University of Kansas and has worked as a
producer of educational films, as a sound editor for film and television, and as a computer
security analyst. He currently lives in Wisconsin with his wife and children near the shores of
Lake Michigan. Check out his latest work at www.darrinlile.com.
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Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: Overview of Materials in Cycles 7
Introduction 7
Material nodes in Cycles 9
Procedural textures in Cycles 18
Setting the World material 25
Creating a mesh-light material 32
Using displacement (aka bump) 42
Chapter 2: Managing Cycles Materials 49
Introduction 49
Preparing an ideal Cycles interface for material creation 50
Naming materials and textures 57
Creating node groups 61
Linking materials 69
Chapter 3: Creating Natural Materials in Cycles 73
Introduction 73
Creating a rock material using image maps 74
Creating a rock material using procedural textures 82
Creating a sand material using procedural textures 88
Creating a simple ground material using procedural textures 99
Creating a snow material using procedural textures 104
Creating an ice material using procedural textures 107
Creating a clean running water material 109
Chapter 4: Creating Man-made Materials in Cycles 113
Introduction 113
Creating a generic plastic material 114
Creating a bakelite material 116
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