You're reading from Photorealistic Materials and Textures in Blender Cycles Create impressive production-ready projects using one of the most powerful rendering engines

Product type Paperback

Published in Oct 2023

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781805129639

Length 394 pages

Edition 4th Edition

Tools

Blender

Concepts

Game Design

Author (1):

Arijan Belec

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Table of Contents (21) Chapters

Preface

1. Part 1: Materials in Cycles FREE CHAPTER

2. Chapter 1: Creating Materials in Blender

3. Chapter 2: Introducing Material Nodes

4. Chapter 3: Mapping Images with Nodes

5. Part 2: Understanding Realistic Texturing

6. Chapter 4: Achieving Realism with Texture Maps

7. Chapter 5: Generating Texture Maps with Cycles

8. Chapter 6: Creating Bumpy Surfaces with Displacement Maps

9. Part 3: UV Mapping and Texture Painting

10. Chapter 7: UV-Unwrapping 3D Models for Texturing

11. Chapter 8: Baking Ambient Occlusion Maps

12. Chapter 9: Introducing Texture Painting

13. Chapter 10: Creating Photorealistic Textures on a 3D Model

14. Part 4: Lighting and Rendering

15. Chapter 11: Lighting a Scene in Cycles

16. Chapter 12: Creating Photorealistic Environments with HDRIs

17. Chapter 13: Preparing the Camera for Rendering

18. Chapter 14: Rendering with Cycles

19. Index

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20. Other Books You May Enjoy

What are HDRIs?

HDRIs are special images that contain a higher range of brightness values than regular images. This allows them to capture the lighting of a real-life environment, which makes them ideal to simulate environments in a 3D scene in Blender. An HDRI will create a background in our world and project light into our scene, which allows us to complete our projects with better lighting and backgrounds.

Figure 12.1 shows a simple scene that has an HDRI applied as an environment texture.

Figure 12.1 – A simple scene with an HDRI environment

As you can see, the metal sphere looks photorealistic simply because of the lighting and shading cast onto the object from the environment.

Figure 12.2. shows what an HDRI looks like when viewed as a regular image. HDRIs are 360-degree images that can be imported into Blender as a spherical light source.