Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook

by Bernardo Iraci

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. Overview In Detail 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 from this book Approach An in-depth guide full of step-by-step recipes to explore the concepts behind the usage of Cycles. Packed with illustrations, and lots of tips and tricks; the easy-to-understand nature of the book will help the reader understand even the most complex concepts with ease. Who this book is written for If you are a digital artist who already knows your way around Blender, and you want to learn about the new Cycles' rendering engine, this is the book for you. Even experts will be able to pick up new tips and tricks to make the most of the rendering capabilities of Cycles.

274 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Michel Anders · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 references

Cons
- could do with some detail renders of the individual materials
- doesn't cover volume shaders


The 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.

Conclusion
A well written book that delivers what it promises. Well worth its money.
(consider buying the e-book as the printed version is in black-and-white)

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book I came to realize how Blender can produce images with photo realism 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.