Blender Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook - Third Edition

Creating a rock material using image maps

In this recipe, we will create a realistic rock material that looks like the samples shown in the following screenshot, using an image map. We'll see a material made with procedurals in the this recipe.

The image-based rock material as it appears in the final rendering

Image maps are particularly useful for several reasons: they already have the necessary color information of a natural surface ready to be used; they can be easily edited in any image editor to obtain different kinds of information, for example, high levels for the bump maps; and they are processed faster than procedurals by the software (procedural ...