Free Webinar: Creating Cycles Node-Materials in Blender
Ben Simonds is hosting a free webinar with O’Reilly on Thursday, December 5.
Blender is a powerful and free 3D graphics tool used by artists and designers worldwide. But even experienced designers can find it challenging to turn an idea into a polished piece. Blender’s new Cycles render features a powerful node-based editor for creating materials. Nodes are a highly customizable way to create a huge variety of materials but it can be daunting to take in at first.
In this hands-on webcast presented by Ben Simonds author of Blender Master Class, he will take you through creating various common material types with nodes for rendering in cycles. From there we will move on to creating more complex materials, incorporating different kinds of texture data and blending together different shader types.
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Let me offer one tip: when putting together node layouts, learn to think like a programmer. Nodes are like a programming language in many ways, in particular the way the complexity can get way out of hand. In my CS classes we learned about avoiding “spaghetti code”. I have seen some node layouts that looked very literally like spaghetti.
Part of it is being neat in your layouts. Another important part is learning to use node groups to avoid repeating yourself. See here for a step-by-step example in taming repetition and complexity in a node layout.