Blender Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook - Third Edition

Chapter 3. Creating Natural Materials in Cycles

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

• Creating a rock material using image maps
• Creating a rock material using procedural textures
• Creating a sand material using procedural textures
• Creating a simple ground material using procedural textures
• Creating a snow material using procedural textures
• Creating an ice material using procedural textures

Introduction

Replicating nature can be difficult. Natural materials are usually the most difficult to recreate in a satisfying way using computers, mainly because the chaos of nature is not the best fit for the orderly logic of an electronic machine.

Too often, we even see cubes that look obviously computer-generated because of the neatness and regularity ...