Blender 2.6 Cycles:Materials and Textures Cookbook

by Enrico Valenza

With this book you'll be able to explore and master all that the Cycles rendering engine is capable of. From the basics right through to refining, this is a must-read if you're serious about the realism of your materials and textures. Overview In Detail Cycles is Blender’s new, powerful rendering engine. Using practical examples, this book will show you how to create a vast array of realistic and stunning materials and texture effects using the Cycles rendering engine. Blender 2.6 Materials and Textures Cookbook is a practical journey into the new and exciting Cycles rendering engine for Blender. In this book you will learn how to create a vast array of materials and textures in Cycles, including glass, ice, snow, rock, metal and water. If you want to take your 3D models to the next level, but don’t know how, then this cookbook is for you! In this practical cookbook, you will learn how to create stunning materials and textures to really bring your 3D models to life! Diving deep into Cycles you will learn Cycle’s node-based material system, how to set-up a 3D scene for rendering, how to create a natural and man-made materials as well as the correct organization and re-use of Cycles materials to save you time and effort. To ensure that your creations look stunning you will learn how illumination works in Cycles, improve the quality of the final render and to avoid the presence of noise and fireflies. Each chapter of Blender 2.6 Materials and Textures Cookbook builds on the complexity of the last so that by the end of this book you will know how to create an impressive library of realistic-looking materials and textures. What you will learn from this book Approach Written in a friendly, practical style this Cookbook deep-dives into a wide-array of techniques used to create realistic materials and textures. Who this book is written for This book is perfect for you if you have used Blender before but are new to the impressive Cycles renderer. You should have some knowledge of the Blender interface, though this is not a strict requirement. If you want to create realistic, stunning materials and textures using Cycles, then this book is for you!

265 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I like about this book are the features "How to do it" and "How it works" which follows each project describing why he chose the methods and why it works.

Chapter One is a gentle introduction taking the reader through a step by step process with color photos. The author explains how increasing the sampling rate reduces the fireflies in a 3D image. He shows how mesh lights produce a soft diffuse light. He uses an hdr image to produce light effects on the subject while giving the reader the option to make the hdr image disappear while keeping the effect which seems like magic.

Chapter two the author shows how to organize inorder to save time when beginning a new texture as well as providing the reader a way to modify just one file instead of a series of files. It begins with a spheroid on a plane.

The rest of the book involves precise recipes using nodes, different textures like the Voroni texture which has a high degree of realism in its crunchy looking texture. Other texture from the Blender cycles render include fresnel, displacement, Musgrave and noise to achieve a variety of texture projects ice, running water, sand, metal, bronze, stone, polystyrene, Bakelite, glass, sponge, rubber, wood, cloth, tree bark, tree leaves, ocean, spaceship hull and Earth.

My favorite projects come from chapter five ocean surface and under water environment. The author constructs the ocean surface using three node groups: one group for the basic ocean plane, another for reflections holds fresnel, reflective and IOR values while a third node group holds foam location values. For the underwater environment the author begins with a cube rescaled twenty one times. He uses a subdivision modifier, ocean modifier geometry displacements. For both ocean projects he uses the linear extrapolation to make the ocean animation constant. I like the underwater fog he added for the added degree of realism.

[Michel Anders · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author, Enrico Valenza, is an experienced and professional Blender user so a book by him is certainly worth checking out. The book presents some thirty shaders in a cookbook style and offers many insights in the Cycles rendering system not limited to specific materials. Although a cookbook implies that you can use the recipes as they are presented, the techniques that are offered in the book will get you a lot further than that and will help you develop skills necessary to develop your own materials because of the very detailed way their implementation is described.

Pros

thorough, each material is described in step-by-step detail and pretty much every avaible Cycles node is featured somewhere and both node groups and frames are covered as well,

comprehensive, both materials based on textures and materials based on procedural noise are covered and the all important concept of layering increasingly fine detail to get realistic textures is featured quite some times,

interesting, some materials feature mainly as a means to illustrate a concept but many materials are quite good and some are even excellent, my favorites are the sponge texture, the leather texture and the ancient bronze texture.

Cons

the introductory chapter on how to set up Cycles and where to find stuff isn't all that clear. This isn't necessarily the author's fault because sometimes the Blender interface can be overwhelming. Maybe this is one of those situations where a video tutorial is useful,

the resolution of the illustrations is way to low. If you try to zoom in the lettering of the node labels isn't readable. And yes, high resolution versions of those illustrations are available for download but that detracts from the reading experience a lot.

Conclusion

Nice and thorough book to get you started on creating materials for Cycles.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

PROS:
Detailed Explanation of creating materials
Wide variety of materials, both man made and natural (Over 40)
Mainly created using procedural textures, so you don't require textures
Pictures included to show node setups and finished effect

CONS:
After the initial materials, it ramps up in complexity and might be a little confusing for beginners until they get the hang of the advanced node setups
Sometimes it goes pages at a time with no pictures and just list after list of nodes to add, maybe a little dry (disclaimer, I read the ebook version)

The "Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook" written by Enrico Valenza is chock full of node "recipes" to create a huge variety of materials in cycles. It spans from simple man made materials such as plastic and rubber, to advanced natural materials like faded copper, or even an ocean material with foam. The majority of these materials are created using blenders procedural textures, which means you don't even need external textures to create these.

The author writes these in a simple to follow, step by step fashion. Beginners to blender, or at least cycles, may have a little learning curve to get over, but the book ramps up in such a way that it begins with simple materials to get you to understand the basics, and as it progresses, the materials get more and more advanced.

Overall, this book is a great value as it not only gives you exact recipes for creating materials, but it also gives you a strong foundation in cycles to create your own materials that might not be included. This is a very useful book that would be a welcome addition to any blender 3D artist's library that wants to learn how to create complex materials using cycles, or for advanced users that want an easy step by step guide to creating these materials.

[Silvanoimboden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enrico Valenza, art director and lead artist of open movie Big Buck Bunny and 2d-3d complete artist presents us this new (relatively, has already two years of development!) Unbiased rendering engine and leads us to discover the creation of materials and complex shader to use in our projects. I am very happy with this cookbook, which covers the creative and artistic components of Cycles, explaining in an easy way the generic mechanisms and settings of the rendering. If mainly focused on what it was conceived cycles for: the creation and preview of complex and realistic shaders and materials in an easy way.
Really recommended for those who are beginning now with the Blender open source 3D software and for those coming from Blender Internal render engine, as well as for anyone who has already used the Cycles renderer and wishing to explore advanced shading or simply discover the proper way of doing things

[Fernando · Rating 5 out of 5]

like any cookbook, enables anyone to obtain in a few, good quality steps, materials for Cycles. I happily noticed that no step has been taken for granted. Even the simplest: "...Split the 3D view into two horizontal rows: move the mouse cursor onto the edge of the window; the cursor changes to a double arrow icon, right-click, and from the context menu select Split Area..." is explained, so that even those who approach Blender for the first time can be immediately productive. More, soon after the author explains the reason for each step, and this is the part where this book becomes really valuable. Enrico Valenza is a complete artist, he knows how to get a good material both with pencils and brushes as in Cycles. When he's explaining, for example, specularity, the concept is so clear that can be easily applied both in Cycles as in any other rendering engine you have at your hands.

[Mozzy69 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although this book is categorized as a Cookbook, I've found it to be a lot more informative than a simple list of steps leading towards a goal, as each recipe is accompanied with insightful notes relating to the techniques used and accompanied with full color illustrations clearly depicting key points of the steps involved. The writers concise style also lends itself well to the cookbook format, but at the same time the examples are not too specific such that adapting the information to my own experiences with Blender were in any way difficult. The book also comes with a useful set of example files that should be obtained from the publishers website, http://www.packtpub.com/blender-2-6-c...

[Fernando Selvatici · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enrico's book is an excelent work tool to create blender materials in cycles renderer. The book presents a series of detailed recipes of different kind of materials (Nature, man-made, organic and so on) with a previous introduction of Blender node system.
For those who still use the blender internal renderer, is a good book to make the transition to cycles renderer.
The resolution of the node configuration images are too low. Of course, there is the alternative of downloading them.