Materials - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 207

To map the textures to the models correctly, I
snapped the 3D Viewport to the camera view ( num ‑
pad 0) and UV unwrapped the foreground objects
using the Unwrap 4 Project from View operator for
each object to which the material was applied. This
projected the objects' UV coordinates to match the
camera's perspective and so allowed me to use the
UV coordinates as the texture coordinates. The
material nodes for this material can be seen in
Figure 12-36.

Leaves
For the leaves, I wanted a translucent material so
that leaves illuminated on one side would appear
bright when viewed from the unlit side as well. To
achieve this, I mixed a Translucent BSDF shader
with a Diffuse BSDF shader and mixed in specular
highlights on top to make the leaves shiny. The leaf
meshes had to be transparent in order to make the
areas of the mesh that weren't part of the leaves
invisible. I accomplished this by mixing the result
of all the nodes so far with a Transparent BSDF
shader, using the alpha map from Chapter 11 to
control the mixing (see Figure 12-35).

Puddles
For the puddles, I needed a water material that
would let some light penetrate the surface and show
some reflections. The glass material alone would do
the job (using an IOR value of 1.33, equal to that of
water), but to get a bit more control over how much
light would penetrate the surface and the strength
of the reflections, I blended Transparent, Glass, and
Glossy BSDF shaders. I mixed in the glossy shader
using a Layer Weight node connected to the Mix
node to get a bit of extra reflection at low viewing
angles.

Foreground Rocks and Soil
In Chapter 11, I created a hand-painted texture for
the foreground objects from the camera's perspec-
tive. To use this, I needed to create a unique material
for these objects. I began by duplicating the material
I created for the statue and then replacing its texture
inputs with the ones I created for the foreground
objects.

Figure 12-35: The material for the IvyGen leaves. The other leaves, which share textures and the same material, were created in
the same way.