I was re-reading through my copy of Digital Lighting and Rendering by Jeremy Birn at the weekend and I thought I really should have a go at one of the lighting challenges that are featured on the supporting website.
Essentially, the challenges are downloadable models (no textures) that you then have to texture and light. I thought it would be good practice. So while it seemed like a great idea I now find myself with a different challenge, I need to create all the materials for the first challenge (a bowl of fruit) before I can get to lighting. A quick browse through the gallery and I found that almost all the entries used procedural materials, so that’s what I’ll do I thought.
The first texture I wanted to try was for an apple. So with that in mind I fired up Cheetah, created a new blank material, switched to the node editor view and started playing around. Anyone that’s looked at the node system before will know that it’s a daunting place, there are loads of options a lot of which are maths based (not good for me!) and there’s not a huge amount of documentation on it either.
Fast forward a couple of hours (which mostly involved trial and error) and I have something that resembles an apple texture. It’s not perfect but it’s better than I had hoped for when I first started out. (If you want a copy of the material I created, it’s available to download here)
I would like to get up to speed with the node system so I’m in a position to be able to record a few tutorials on it, but for now I need to experiment some more. Next up, a grape…