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Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook

Introduction

Welcome to the Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook. Before we start, I would like to talk about the new Blender rendering engine.

Cycles is a brand new unbiased rendering engine based on the path tracing algorithm that Blender has provided to users. It is still under heavy development but is growing really fast and is already capable of creating astonishing images.

Path tracing is an algorithm that computes how light travels in an environment in a very accurate way. For this reason, it is also a pretty heavy rendering algorithm. The good news is that Cycles can rely on modern video card power to make rendering times shorter.

Cycles also has a Global Illumination (GI) system. GI is a system that is used to simulate the bouncing of light different different surfaces. Earlier, to achieve similar effects with Blender internal renderer, it was necessary to manually fake it. Now, Cycles will do this for us. GI changes a lot in the way we can set up lighting for our scenes, as now each object's color influences and is influenced by other objects around it and in general everything will behave in a way closer to reality.

Another new key feature is the accompanying node-based shader system. It is a really powerful tool that will allow us to create a great variety of shaders, from the simplest to really advanced ones.

One could already be used to working with nodes, since the Blender Internal engine can also use nodes to set up shaders, not to mention the Blender compositing system, which is also based on nodes.

Anyway, the first approach with this system can be a bit hard sometimes. This is why I believe that a brief introduction, where we can see the concepts behind the usage of nodes, will be very useful to fully master the recipes that we are going to see in this book.

Just as a cook must know the ingredients at his/her disposal in order to cook tasty food, we too have to know which tools we can use to achieve the renders we want. When we cook our recipes later in the book, we will cover everything with the attention it deserves. If some passage is not perfectly clear, you can always come back to this introduction in order to understand how the tools that we will use will work.

So, let's see these concepts together!

Knowing your ingredients

Using nodes mainly means one thing: mixing different elements such as shaders, images, colors, and values. What makes nodes so powerful is that we can balance the mix of these elements as we like. We can use a simple value, images, colors, or even complex mathematical operations to decide how much of either value we want to see in our final material. The good thing is that we can repeat this process as many times as we want. However, we cannot mix things randomly. Nodes are powerful, but we need to follow a certain logic in order to make them work properly. To better understand the philosophy behind nodes, I have given an example that I hope will help.

Let's think of a node this way: nodes are like food processors. I am talking about blenders, mixers, and machines to make tomato sauce; ovens and stoves to make pasta, and so on. To use a food processor, you put in some ingredients and it does its work. Then, you take what the food processor has produced and use it in a different food processor until you get the final meal ready. Of course, you cannot put tomatoes directly in the oven to make a pizza. You have to first put them in the tomato sauce machine and only when you have the sauce, can you put it on the pizza.

Well, nodes work exactly the same way. Each node is like a different food processor specialized for doing different things. We will put in some information to the left as inputs and the node will give us an output to the right. When we think that our meal is ready, we will put the result of the nodes' work inside the output node and get our final material.

As I am sure you are eager to start, let's jump straight into Blender! Blender Internal is still the default engine in Blender, so we will first need to select Cycles from the render menu. Now open up a node editor in a separate window and with the default cube selected, select the Use Nodes checkbox by clicking on it in the materials menu.

Here you have them... nodes! What you see there is a diffuse node and an output node. The output node is quite important as it will always be the last node of a material but is also quite self-explanatory. So, now let's focus on the Diffuse BSDF node for a moment. As you can see, we have some small colorful circles on the left-hand side (inputs) and some on the right-hand side (outputs). You may also notice that these inputs and outputs have different colors. Just as with the food example, we can't just plug any node anywhere. We need to adhere to certain rules. Colors will help us distinguish between the various ingredients in order to mix them in the correct way. Here we have the following types of inputs:

Color (the yellow circle)
Roughness (the grey circle)
Normal (the blue circle)

On the right-hand side, we have the output values. In this case, there's only one: a shader (the green circle). We are using the Diffuse BSDF node as an example, but each node has a different combination of inputs and outputs. In Cycles, you will find only these four aforementioned kinds of nodes.

As a general rule, we should always connect nodes by following their colors. Green with green, yellow with yellow, and so on. We will see, however, that it is possible to convert some of these values from where it comes from in order to use them inside an input of a different kind.

Now let's see what kind of ingredients we can find inside each color group:

The yellow circle: Here, we have the color information. This means RGB inputs (plain color) or images from files (textures). Cycles' procedural textures can also generate color information.
The gray circle: These are numeric values. However, black and white images can also be used as numeric values, black being 0 and white being 1. The same thing is true for alpha values. Keep in mind that in many situations 1 will be the maximum and 0 the minimum value. This means that, for example, if we want to mix two shaders, the mixing factor will lie in the range of 0 to 1. At these extremes, only one of the two shaders will actually be visible. Of course, numbers inbetween are endless.
The blue circle: Under this group, we can find vector information. Vectors mainly are information about the position and orientation of points and surfaces in space. So, for instance, we can use this vector info for normal maps or bump maps in order to tell Cycles what the surface of a certain object must look like.
The green circle: This is the shader group and contains the information about how surfaces react to light.

As we will see in our recipes, these groups are not completely separate from each other, but there are many ways to convert the information in order to use them for our needs.

Now, let's have a look at the concept of the sequence that a material node tree should usually follow. In the rest of this chapter, we have to picture a node setup. Let's analyze it to better understand what's going on.

We always start from the left-hand side. The first node you see in the following screenshot is a Texture Coordinate node, and it is needed to tell Cycles what kind of texture coordinates we want to use for the textures of the material we are creating. This node belongs to the input nodes group. These kinds of nodes (inputs), as the name says, are used to generate some kind of input (values, colors, and so on); so, they only have output sockets. They are used to provide information about the object on which we want to apply the material we are creating.

Proceeding to the right, we can see that there is a Wave Texture node. This is a procedural texture built in into Cycles. It receives the information about the vector from the Texture Coordinate node. Looking at the node, we can see that there are several empty sockets on the left-hand side. We can change the values manually, but each of these sockets can also receive information from other nodes just as we are doing for the Vector socket.

From the right-hand side of the node, you can see that we are plugging the Wave Texture node's Color output into the Color input of a diffuse shader and a Bump node. The Bump node will convert the color information of the Color output of the Wave Texture node into vector information, which is used to give a bump effect to the surface of our object.

Moving further to the right, we find two shaders. As we saw earlier, the Diffuse BSDF node takes the Color input from Wave Texture, while the glossy shader has a plain white color. Note that more input sockets are left empty so that we can manually change the values instead of using other nodes as input information.

These two shaders are then mixed using a Mix Shader node with a factor of 0.2. This means that the output of this mix node will take 80 percent of the information from the upper input socket (in this case, the diffuse) and 20 percent from the lower one (the glossy).

Lastly, the result is plugged into a Material Output node. As said before, this is always the last node of a material.

Looking at the node setup, we can see that each output has the same color as the input into which it is plugged, with the exception of the Bump node. This node takes the values from the color information (the node automatically converts any color information into a black and white format) and converts it into vector information.

This simple material setup is helpful in understanding a correct sequence of nodes:

A look at the hardware

As said before, Cycles is a pretty heavy render engine and needs the appropriate hardware to work correctly. Moreover, it gives us the possibility to use the power of modern graphic cards to speed up render time. Not every card will work with Cycles, so I thought it'd be worth it to say a couple of words about this topic.

Cycles can render on both CPU and GPU, even if at the moment it cannot use them at the same time. That being said, GPU render is faster than CPU (at least for the same amount of money spent on these two items), but the first one presents some limitations.

First of all, GPU rendering with Cycles works only with CUDA at the moment. CUDA is a proprietary technology of NVIDIA. This means that at the current state of its development, GPU rendering with Cycles only works with cards equipped with an NVIDIA chip, such as GeForce, Quadro, or Tesla cards. A similar technology that will allow Cycles to take advantage of video cards is OpenCL. This is an open source technology, which is supported also by AMD (and others, but AMD is the main NVIDIA competitor) cards, but unfortunately at the time of writing, developers have still not managed to implement these libraries in a usable way mainly due to the fact that OpenCL is still under heavy development.

So, to summarize, it is good to repeat it once again. At the time of writing these lines if you want to use a GPU to render in Cycles you need an NVIDIA card, and it looks like things are not going to change any time soon.

Now, what video card should we buy to get the best out of Cycles? I guess you are not new to computer graphics, so you may already have guessed the answer. The more you are willing to pay, the better the performance you will get. There are, however, some important points to keep in mind.

First of all, Cycles will load up all the information needed to render the scenes onto the video card memory. When the VRAM (video RAM) is full, your render will fail. This should make you understand the first important point—Performance is really important, but if you cannot render a scene at all, it is quite useless.

The second important point is that developing features for the GPU is much more difficult than developing them for the CPU. As I am writing these lines for example, new Cycles features such as strand rendering and SSS are available only for the CPU.

The third important point is that new Cycles releases often brought two things, among others, until now—Faster CPU rendering and slower GPU rendering. At the moment, GPU rendering still has the best performance/price ratio, but it's important to keep in mind the preceding three points while choosing the right hardware.

Choosing the CPU for Cycles is pretty straightforward. Any CPU will work fine, and the faster the CPU, the faster the render time will be. Keep in mind that there are fairly big differences between operating systems here as well. Both Linux and OS X are much faster than Windows while rendering on the CPU. The only way to get similar performances in Windows is by using a MinGW (Minimalist GNU for Windows) or the Visual Basic 2012 build of Blender. These are Blender versions built using a different compiler from the default one used, and they provide similar render times to Linux and OS X while using the CPU. The problem is that the stability of this version is not guaranteed.

Speaking of video cards, performances among operating systems is quite similar. Here is a brief list of some of the best video cards to use with Cycles in the order of performance. I will not list professional video cards such as Quadro or Tesla as they would require a more in-depth analysis. In my humble opinion, most Cycles users will not benefit from their usage:

GTX TITAN 6 GB
GTX 590 3GB
GTX 690 4GB
GTX 580 1.5/3 GB
GTX 680 2/4 GB
GTX 670 2/4 GB
GTX 570 1.2/2.5 GB
GTX 660 Ti 1.5/3 GB
GTX 560 Ti 1/2 GB

As you can see, apart from TITAN, the fastest single chip video card is still a 580 GTX. Despite the fact that the 6xx is newer, the rendering performance remains the same, or in some cases even got worse than the older 5xx. However, the 6xx comes with a higher amount of memory on board, which is an advantage on its side.

It is important to notice that the GTX x90 models are double chip versions of the x80 cards. They are faster, but the real amount of memory is half of how much is written. This is because the total amount has to be divided between the two chips, so Cycles will only be able to use half of the memory.

Some less powerful video cards than the ones listed here will usually still be faster than many CPUs, so in case you don't want to change the whole computer, it can still be a good deal to buy a cheap video card if you have an old CPU. Anyway, I advise you to always check benchmarks for the specific CPU or video card you are looking for. Keep in mind however, that a new high-end CPU (such as the Intel i7-4770K) under Linux will perform almost as fast as any lower-level card, other than the ones listed before.

Before moving on to the first chapter of this book, I would like to provide you with a useful link where Blender users upload their performance results with Cycles:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?239480-2.61-Cycles-render-benchmark

In the first post you will find a link to the benchmark used, another one where you can upload your results, and a last link that will open up a page with a result summary.

Key benefits

Get acquainted with the lighting and rendering concepts of the Blender Cycles engine

Learn the concepts behind nodes shader system and get the best out of Cycles in any situation

Packed with illustrations and a lot of tips and tricks to make your scenes come to life

Description

Blender provides a broad spectrum of modeling, texturing, lighting, animation and video post-processing functionality in one package. It provides cross-platform interoperability, extensibility and a tightly integrated workflow. Blender is one of the most popular Open Source 3D graphics applications in the world. Modern GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit) have some limitations for rendering complex scenes. This is mainly because of limited memory, and interactivity issues when the same graphics card is also used for displaying and rendering frames. This is where Cycles rendering engine comes into play. Cycles is bundled as an add-on with Blender. Some of the features of Cycles is its quality, speed and having integrated industry standard libraries. This book will show you how to carry out your first steps in Cycles - a brand new rendering engine for Blender. In a gradual and logical way, you will learn how to create complex shaders and lighting setups to face any kind of situation that you may find in Computer Graphics. This book provides information on how to setup your first application in Cycles. You will start by adding lights, materials, and textures to your scene. When it's time for the final render, you will see how to setup Cycles in the best way. You will learn about a wide variety of materials, lighting, techniques, tips, and tricks to get the best out of Cycles. Further on in the book, you will get to know about animation and still shots, and learn how to create advanced materials for realistic rendering, as well cartoon style shaders. This cookbook contains a wide range of different scenes, proposed in a structured and progressive order. During this journey, you will get involved in the concepts behind every step you take in order to really master what you learn.

What you will learn

Understand how to use the node editor

Learn to create your first material in Cycles

Light a scene in Cycles

Deal with animations in Cycles

Design complex shaders and lighting setups

Get the best out of your renders thanks to Cycles render passes

Create complex realistic shaders using advanced techniques

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Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook

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M. J. Anders Apr 11, 2014

Pros- cookbook style with many examples- thorough coverage of all things Cycles- gentle learning curve- some really great materials (especially carpaint and food)- addresses lighting as well- plenty of relevant external referencesCons- could do with some detail renders of the individual materials- doesn't cover volume shadersThe Cycles rendering engine has been available for some time now in Blender but it is still hot because it enables the artist to produce great results. However, its many options can overwhelm a person just starting out, so Bernardo's cookbook is a blessing both for beginners as well as for more accomplished artists.The book is well written and covers almost everything from basic node setups to very complex ones, including subsurface scattering nodes and script nodes. The illustrations of the node setups are also very clear and although the book's style is a cookbook, the reasoning behind the creation of the materials is often explained as well which really helps to understand why the materials are set up the way the are.I also like that the is a fair amount of information on lighting because now matter how good your materials are, without proper lighting your render won't shine. The book presents some useful lightning setups and covers both mesh lighting and HDRI lighting quite well.The criticisms I have are minor indeed: the book doesn't cover the new volume shaders but this is of course not a fault of the author. Cycles evolves at a rapid pace and at the time of writing volume shaders were not yet available.Also it would have been clearer of some of the many materials presented in this book would have closeup example renders; now there is just a larger overall render of a scene at the beginning of each chapter which doesn't show the smaller details very well. Of course the sample scenes are available to the reader so you can render them yourself but it would have made for an easier read.All in all I really enjoyed reading this book and in my opinion it is one of the better ones on Blender published so far.ConclusionA well written book that delivers what it promises. Well worth its money (but consider buying the e-book as the print version is in black and white).

Amazon Verified review

Ann Jan 25, 2014

Reading this book I came to realize how Blender can produce images with photorealism accuracy. The author's recipes are float point precision from RGB colors, Index of Refraction to factoring levels in mixing nodes. Photographic terms: depth of field, bokeh effect and exposure levels are used. Bernardo begins by discussing GPU vs. CPU and video cards. He introduces the reader to the three point light system using emitting planes and gives those lighted mesh subtle hues. I like the way he lights the environment. An hdr image is loaded in the environment texture which adds reflection. He uses sun position along with an IBL plug in and chooses Latitude, Longitude and Time settings for the outdoor landscape. Grass is made with the particle system which is ready for animation. He guides the reader for changing the scenes. The interior scene with plant, lamp, chair bathed in sunlight becomes night. IES, a plug in used by professionals, saves on polygon count. Throughout the book the author maintains focus on the lighting, IOR, rendering time, nodes while he develops textures for a glass full of water, a glass of wine, bottle of wine, grapes, a car with realistic reflections, toys inside a space ship, and a model of a young lady by the sea.

ricarda4846 Jun 12, 2014

Excellent, in Detail, fundamentals well explained and steps up to pro.Good examples, really goes into depth and very hands on, the way it should be.Time is taken to explain the how's, what's and whys

Suzette Gray Aug 18, 2014

a gift for my brother and he seems happy with it

Davin Cheaney Mar 04, 2014

My review pretty much echors that of the other posters.This is my second cookbook from Packt that I have worked through. The first being "Blender 2.6 cycles: Materials and Textures". In this book it is very clear that the author has an amazing amount of knowledge. The book also covers so many things that I am very interested in learning and improving on.Having said that , I feel the same about this book as I did about the first one I went through. It DESPERATELY needed to be reviewed by a technical editor before being released. Also, as others have said, you MUST get the PDF version with color imagages. The black and white that comes in the print version will make things more difficult.If this author was to put out another book on this subject, would I get it? In a heart beat. I would pre-order it today if if I heard there was a second edition coming out. I am actualy praying that when Blender 2.70 is released, the author will do just that. I learned alot from this book, and that is what I was hoping for.

Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook: If you're already au fait with Blender, this book gives extra power to your artist's elbow with a fantastic grounding in Cycles. Packed with tips and recipes, it makes light work of the toughest concepts. , Second Edition

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Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook

Introduction

Knowing your ingredients

A look at the hardware

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Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook: If you're already au fait with Blender, this book gives extra power to your artist's elbow with a fantastic grounding in Cycles. Packed with tips and recipes, it makes light work of the toughest concepts. , Second Edition

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