Materials - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 183

12
mAteriAls

In Chapters 10 and 11, I created textures that speci-
fied the diffuse colors for the models, as well as
other parameters, like reflectiveness, smoothness,
and specular colors. Now we'll look at combining
these image textures with procedural textures and
shaders to create materials for the scenes that look
both interesting and convincing.
This chapter will cover how Blender's materi-
als work and how to incorporate textures into these
materials. Let's look first, though, at Blender's two
default render engines for rendering images, Cycles
and the Blender Internal renderer, as they will sig-
nificantly impact how we set up our materials.

techniques to create the final render, eschewing
absolute physical accuracy for speed and flexibility.
However, this lack of physical accuracy doesn't mean
that Blender Internal can't render realistic- looking
images. It can quickly render scenes with a variety
of complex materials to create a final look anywhere
between a highly realistic aesthetic and a very non-
photo-realistic and stylized one. This makes Blender
Internal a highly flexible renderer, well suited to
animation.
Cycles is Blender's new render engine, which
is still in active development. Unlike the internal
engine, it focuses on creating more realistic simu-
lations of light and uses more physically correct
models for materials and lights. As a result, it can
deliver very realistic images, including effects that
are difficult to achieve in Blender Internal, such as
the complex refraction of light in glass and other
transparent objects, multiple reflections of light
bouncing around a scene, and the physically cor-
rect emission of light from objects. The tradeoff
is that (at least as of this writing) Cycles renders
scenes—even those with simple lighting—more

Render Engines: Blender Internal
and Cycles
The render engine is how Blender creates a final
image using all of the information in your scene—
objects, materials, lights, and settings. Blender has
two render engines. The older one, the Blender
Internal render engine, is a very robust (if slightly
old-fashioned) renderer that uses various tricks and