Light Rays and Make Believe

I think its about time I talked Blender. You may have seen it making its way into ALL of my work. Blender is a professional, free, and open source modeling software commonly used for animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, and video games. I learned it in community college when I was dirt poor and didn't want to drive downtown to learn 3D modeling and rendering. There are a couple engines in Blender, but I'm going to be talking about my go-to: Cycles Rendering Engine. Cycles is a path-tracing rendering system that will calculate a set number of sample rays of light.

If I tell it to take 10 samples, it will get a very vague idea of how light interacts with surfaces.

If I take 500 samples, I see textures, rays of light, and reflections much easier. These images are the same size, but the right seems much smoother, because the engine took the time to figure out what exact color was bouncing back towards the camera at each pixel.

How the light rays behave is decided by materials. You can do almost anything with Cycles materials.

This setup adds virtual bumps in the material. When light reflects off of the orange, parts of the sphere that SHOULD reflect back to the camera show no reflection due to textures that tell the light what to do. This gives the appearance of an uneven surface.

Here the setup has light reflect off of the raised parts of the wood grain (just like how polished wood behaves). This is achieved by using the lighter parts of the wood grain texture to tell the engine where to show reflection. If there is no reflection, the diffuse, normal texture comes through.

Blender can even achieve complex materials like wax. The left object is merely reflective, but the right object has subsurface scattering applied, which means the engine will calculate what happens if some rays enter the object and are scattered by something like wax.

IMITATION is the main goal of much of my work.

It requires asking certain questions of a material. Where does it shine? Where is it dull? What imperfections does it have? What shape are they? How should they be reacting to light? Notice in the above picture how the rendered cup has reflections in the exact same places as the physical cup. Textures are stretch horizontally from the forming and glazing of the cup. The cup has a kind of dull reflection, with a mottled texture and misshapen imperfections on the surface.

All of this was taken into account when creating the cup material.

Only after imitating life can we create things that look like real life but don't exist. Its the substance of things that we want to show in our renderings. The actual shape of models become less important when we get the materials right,

Simple geometries, with some bevels applied. You can't get much more basic.

But with materials applied (and some pre-made complex lighting) it becomes much more convincing. This material deals only with a diffuse texture and some applied "bumps"