Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook

Blender 2.5

Materials and Textures Cookbook

Written by Colin Litser and published by Packtpub Publishers.

Colin Litser began his passion for animation, and things 3D, after studying for an Art degree with 3D in its title. He is currently a contributing editor to Essential Blender.

This book is 291 pages, 9-chapter tutorial. A tutorial cutting across through levels of animation, modeling, special effects, painting, modifying image textures and a whole lot more.

The book covers the creation of several things in chapters.

Chapter 1. Natural Materials

Natural materials like rocks. It seems quite simple doesn’t it? It goes on to teach you how to texture the rock using nodes.

For somebody new but relatively familiar with Blender, this book is for you! For each chapter, the tutorials start with simple objects moving on to a bit more complex objects.

Chapter 2. Man-made Materials

Really impressive. Being one of the most used textures or materials, learning how to make those textures is pretty important.

Colin has created different tutorials in this chapter but all of them are related and lead to one thing in the end. It’s like making different parts of something then to realize they were parts of the same thing after everything is done. In this case, a roof. A copper plated rusty roof that emphasizes age, tileable, weathering effect and what not.

It’s pretty awesome, I was getting excited myself while going through thinking I can actually achieve something that has been bugging me for a while.

What we basically get to learn here is:

• Warping a texture to disguise seams in a repeated texture.
• Combining material using nodes.
• Creating realistic copper material.
• Adding oxidization weathering to our copper material.

That and among others, you’ll get to know once you get the book.

Chapter 3

3 is all about animation baby! Animating materials. That was new to me too, I wondered if it was possible and it is!

What’s covered in this chapter is:

• How to move texture and create animation without moving mesh.

-This can be done in a couple of ways one of them being:

Using coordinates to move texture over time.

Very interesting stuff, and once you know all that think of what you can do!

One more thing , Colin explains how to animate transparency in texture e.g. to represent a burning sheet of paper.

Chapter 4

For you to begin creating you first need to know how to manage a Blender scene, materials.

• Setting an ideal Blender interface.
• Setting up a scene for materials creation
• Naming materials and textures

What got me excited was appending materials.

This means using materials and textures in other

Blend files. Reusing them to save on time and money of recreating them again

Blender gives you the tools to make this possible.

While appending has its advantages, sometimes we may have to work with proxy objects and materials in production. In this situation, it’s vital to have linked materials. This helps because a link is retained to all multiple blend files. Once something is changed in the source file, that it’s updated in all other multiple blend files, and that saves you time.

I learned something new as well. Packing of files, what is called archiving in 3dmax.Something that enable’s you to pack textures and materials into one file and be able to move and work with the same from a different machine.

Awesome!!

Chapter 5

Explores further man-made materials but gets a bit more complex. For example, Colin shows us:

-How to create rust iron-based materials.

-Varying raytracing reflections to simulate dirt and grime.

Pretty sleek!!

Chapter 6

Like 5, 6 explores more complex material creation but more natural than man-made like:

• -creating a wave surface using textures (imagine that)
• -Creating imagine and bump maps with alpha channels.

Sweet stuff.

Chapter 7

Forget creating in this chapter, this chapter is all about UV Mapping and subsurface scattering.

Here we explore mapping textures directly on the faces of the mesh. An area where this is expressively used is the simulation of skin, from the leathery exterior of a dinosaur to the ultimate nirvana of the human head.

Through this chapter we work through common UV problems and their solutions in Blender.

• You learn how to create a face map from a photograph
• Learning how to extract color, bump and specularity.
• Applying UVs to create an accurate skin material

This book is all about accuracy in complexity.

Chapter 8

Painting & Modifying Image Textures in Blender

• In this chapter we will cover:-
• Post processing rendered images from within Blender (ocean animation)
• Adding several materials to a surface.
• Adding dirt to a model &
• Creating an aged photo with simple Blender materials

We learn ways to speed up renders and animations by using special painting techniques to significantly lower render times.

All these could save you time as well as minimize the agony to tight timescales.

Chapter 9

Chapter 9 is all about special effects. Some of the things we learn here are:

Creating smoke in blender

Adding complex FX without the render overhead.

Knowing special effects is a very crucial skill in 3d and digital media as a whole. It plays a big role in this industry and has propelled Blender to the forefront.

The difference between smoke and fire and explosions is all about textures and knowing how to even switch between those materials, knowing this will put you on top.

Bottom line, this book is crucial link between the not so beginners and the ones well versed in Blender. Each chapter as I said earlier has been broken down into tutorials that all add up to one thing.

It has important information on crucial aspects of 3d like UV Mapping and special effects.

In my opinion, a must read. I only wish it had more recipes!!

February 22, 2011 | Categories: Blender3d, photoshopped, Reviews | Tags: 3d, Blender 2.5, blender 3d, colin litser, Materails and textures in 3d, packtpub publishers | 55 Comments »