3D Environment Design with Blender

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The Basics of Realistic Texturing in Blender

Materials are the holy grail for achieving photorealism. If we have only 10 hours to spend on a scene to make it photorealistic, I would say you need to probably put at least 5 to 6 hours into materials – that’s more than 50% of the work. Yes, materials are that important.

We can get away with some modeling mistakes: the scale can be 90% off and we can get away with it. But with materials, if the shading and textures don’t match that of real-world materials, our scene will be screaming fake. There is something about the way the light hits an object; if the object is a piece of wood, the light will behave differently than when it hits a metal bar.

In this chapter, we will highlight the importance ...