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Photorealistic Materials and Textures in Blender Cycles

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

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Product type Paperback
Published in Oct 2023
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781805129639
Length 394 pages
Edition 4th Edition
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Author (1):
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Arijan Belec Arijan Belec
Author Profile Icon Arijan Belec
Arijan Belec
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Table of Contents (21) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Part 1: Materials in Cycles
2. Chapter 1: Creating Materials in Blender FREE CHAPTER 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 20. Other Books You May Enjoy

Baking Normal maps in Blender

We will now learn to bake normal maps in Blender using the Cycles render engine. Baking is the process of saving attributes such as color, roughness, or even bumpiness into an image that can be exported or used elsewhere. The features on the surface in Figure 5.17 can be baked into a normal map image so that it can be used to simulate the same features, without actually creating them as a 3D surface. This method will allow us to simulate highly detailed surfaces without increasing the polygon count of our scene.

Figure 5.17 – Surface details

Figure 5.17 – Surface details

These features are easy to replace with a normal map because they are quite close to the surface, and they appear as bumps rather than separate objects. In the following steps, we will turn these surface details into a normal map:

  1. Add a plane right above the surface with the details.
Figure 5.18 – Adding a plane above the surface with details

Figure 5.18 – Adding a plane above the surface with...

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