Chapter 9. Special Materials

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

• Using Cycles volume materials
• Creating a cloud volumetric material
• Creating a "fire and smoke" shader
• Creating a shadeless material in Cycles
• Creating a fake immersion effect material
• Creating a fake volume light material

Introduction

In this final chapter, we are going to see some special materials, that is, materials that can be used for special effects or for situations where very realistic results are not required, for example, creation of volumetric effects (fire, smoke, mist, volumetric light, and so on) and special materials to obtain peculiar results (shadeless images, alpha backgrounds, and so on).

Using Cycles volume materials

In all the recipes we have seen so far, Cycles used the Surface input socket and (very rarely) the Displacement input socket for the bump effects of the Material Output node to make the renderings. Assigning colors or textures to the surface of an object clearly...