Learning Blender: A Hands-On Guide to Creating 3D Animated Characters

Shading Your Character with Cycles

Now that you have Blender Render under control, let’s see how Cycles works because its features are quite different. Materials and lighting are physically based on reality and the material properties are also very different from those of Blender Render. In addition, the way in which you will build materials in Cycles has almost nothing in common with how you created materials in the previous sections with Blender Render.

Caution

Make sure you select Cycles from the Render Engine selector in the main menu at the top of the interface; otherwise, you won’t see the options explained in this section.