Hi there!
I’ve got one of the first copy as a preview of this new book, the Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook, by Enrico Valenza (http://www.enricovalenza.com/). It is brillian 3D Artist, illustrator and Art Director, and also known for being the Lead Artist in the Big Buck Bunny production and in other projects in which I was also involved.
Blender 2.6 Cycles:Materials and Textures Cookbook
Now It’s very hot here in Italy and we are preparing for summer holidays… so I’ll do only a short review to explain why this is a valid and valuable book and why every cycles beginner and also expert user should have it.
With this article i’d like to cover some interesting and indispensable node configurations made for cycles.
Here you can find topic like realistic foliage/leafs, dupliverts random materials, realistic rusty configurations, vertex color configurations, fake glass and and many others ready to use node configurations for cycles.
This 3D model is a lavender plant that i’ve modeled to add detail to an outdoor architectural render.
It’s free to download and rehuse!
Click the image to enlarge.
This file is an example to demonstrate the capabilities of UVProject modifier combined with the Cycles render engine.
The cube is textured with two UV mapped textures managed through the UVProject modifier.
( For further information on the UV Project modifier, see the how to tutorial:
In order to map some objects, since pre-2.5 versions, blender users had the support of many tools, one of them was the Object map input:
with this technique, you could map a texture to an object referencing the mapping to another object, like an empty, a cube or a more complex 3d object.
Nowadays things changed a lot and with the advent of cycles, in Blender 2.61, artists from all over the world, tried this new render engine that supports only its node materials setting, meaning that the old fascinated easy way to map a texture from an object was old and dead…
In some cases the uv map cannot be used with some particular situation, like the triangulation or ngons faces; in other situations the mesh is just too complex to be correctly unwrapped.
In those cases there is the pretty new modifier that provide a new way to map texture referenced to position,scale and rotation of another object: The UV Project modifier