Blender 2.6 Cycles, Materials and Textures Cookbook

by Enrico Valenza

Overview

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 Cycles, 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 Cycles 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781782161301
Publisher:	Packt Publishing
Publication date:	05/13/2013
Pages:	280
Sales rank:	1,056,261
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.59(d)

About the Author

Enrico Valenza, also known on the web as “EnV”, is an italian freelance illustrator, mainly collaborating with publishers as Mondadori Ragazzi and Giunti as cover artist for sci-fi and fantasy books. He graduated at Liceo Artistico Statale in Verona (Italy) and later has been student of illustrator and painter Giorgio Scarato.

When he started to work, computers weren't that much usual between the common people, and he spent the first 15 years of career doing illustration with traditional media, usually on cardboard; particularly, he specialized in the use of the air-graph, a technique particularly esteemed for advertisement works. Till the moment “Jurassic Park” came to the theaters: then he decided to buy a computer and try this “computer graphic” everyone was talking about. Totally self-taught for what concern the many aspects of cg, it has been 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 for the two last weeks of production the Orange Team in Amsterdam, to help in finalizing the shots of the first open-source cg animated short movie produced by the Blender Foundation, "Elephants Dream". In 2007 - 2008 he has been Lead Artist in the Peach Project Team for the production of “Big Buck Bunny”, the second Blender Foundation's open movie. In 2010 — 2011 he has been 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 the Bologna city history. Being also a “Blender Certified Trainer”, he collaborates as cg artist with Italian production studios that had decided to switch their pipeline to the open-source.

Enrico Valenza 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 starting point for painting over with other open-source applications like The Gimp or, more recently, MyPaint. He has made several presentations and workshops about Blender and its use in productions.