Cycles Materials
Unlike the Blender Internal renderer, which is packed with dirty tricks and approximations to make rendering quicker, the Cycles renderer uses more physically realistic models for materials. It combines realism with a node-based approach that focuses on building up complex materials from simple parts. You can still use the Materials tab of the Properties editor to edit Cycles materials, which gives an overview of the current material, but it’s much simpler and clearer to use Blender’s Node editor, as shown in Figure 12-7.
To create a material with Cycles, all you need is a Shader node and Material Output node. You can build out from there and combine other shaders, inputs, and textures to create a wide variety of materials. To ...
Get Blender Master Class now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
