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

View More author details

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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Using Normal maps to detail surfaces

Normal maps are special texture maps used to simulate surface details and bumps. Their purpose is to increase the level of apparent detail on a texture or object without adding any new geometry. Normal maps, as with other texture maps, can also be applied through Image Texture nodes, but they will require us to change a few extra things to let Blender know that this is a special type of image. Figure 4.11 shows an example of a Normal map.

Figure 4.11 – A simple Normal map

To apply this Normal map, we must first set Color Space to Non-Color in the Image Texture node. Then, we must add a normal map node and plug it into the Normal input of the Principled BSDF node. Blender will now know how to read this image correctly.