Blender 2.6 Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook

Written in a friendly, practical style this Cookbook deep-dives into a wide-array of techniques used to create realistic materials and textures. This book is perfect for you if you have used Blender before but are new to the impressive Cycles renderer. You should have some knowledge of the Blender interface, though this is not a strict requirement. If you want to create realistic, stunning materials and textures using Cycles, then this book is for you!

About the Author :
Enrico Valenza, also known on the web as “EnV”, is an italian freelance illustrator, mainly collaborating with publishers as Mondadori Ragazzi and Giunti as cover artist for sci-fi and fantasy books. He graduated at Liceo Artistico Statale in Verona (Italy) and later has been student of illustrator and painter Giorgio Scarato.When he started to work, computers weren't that much usual between the common people, and he spent the first 15 years of career doing illustration with traditional media, usually on cardboard; particularly, he specialized in the use of the air-graph, a technique particularly esteemed for advertisement works. Till the moment “Jurassic Park” came to the theaters: then he decided to buy a computer and try this “computer graphic” everyone was talking about. Totally self-taught for what concern the many aspects of cg, it has been his encounter with the open-source philosophy that actually opened a brand new world of possibilities; in particular Blender.In 2005 he won the “Suzanne Awards” for “Best animation, original idea and story” with the animation “New Penguoen 2.38”. In 2006 he joined for the two last weeks of production the Orange Team in Amsterdam, to help in finalizing the shots of the first open-source cg animated short movie produced by the Blender Foundation, 'Elephants Dream'. In 2007 - 2008 he has been Lead Artist in the Peach Project Team for the production of “Big Buck Bunny”, the second Blender Foundation's open movie. In 2010 – 2011 he has been Art Director at CINECA (Bologna, Italy) for the “Museo della Citta di Bologna” project, that is the production of a stereoscopic cg animated documentary made in Blender and explaining the Bologna city history. Being also a “Blender Certified Trainer”, he collaborates as cg artist with Italian production studios that had decided to switch their pipeline to the open-source.Enrico Valenza uses Blender almost on a daily basis for his illustration jobs, rarely to have the illustration rendered straight by the 3d package, more often as starting point for painting over with other open-source applications like The Gimp or, more recently, MyPaint. He has made several presentations and workshops about Blender and its use in productions.