PBR Shading: An Introduction

Although it is nothing new, physically based rendering (PBR) has received a lot of attention recently. PBR shading tries to emulate the way objects react to light in the real world. Because of this, it has become widely popular in the gaming industry as it provides more realistic results with a faster workflow. By using real world principles, PBR shaders react much more realistically and stay more consistent under different lighting conditions. Join the new generation of artists and continue reading to see how to use these in your workflow.

Shader Review: Advanced Gold Shader v1.2

The Advanced Gold Shader v1.2 by Jim Morren is a realistic gold shader made for the Cycles render engine. It has realistic qualities and very nice control over them. Continue reading to see my full review and comparison.

Sintel’s Portrait

With this project, I really wanted to try my hand at posing. It was fun but challenging. This was also my first attempt at using PBR shaders in a project. I really enjoyed using them, as it was much easier to achieve the look I wanted.

I hope you guys like it!

Material Study: Gold

So after playing with my gold shader some more, I realized it just didn’t look realistic enough. Instead I am going to be showcasing some more realistic materials.

Cycles Gold Material Test

Image by Kemmler

This is one of the most realistic gold materials. He provides the full node setup on BlenderArtists. Be sure to check it out.

Advanced Gold Shader for Cycles

Image by Jim Morren on Blender Market

This is by far the most realistic gold material I’ve seen in Blender. And, for only $9.95, this is a steal. I plan on purchasing this in the future and will give you guys a full review.

Well, those are the two most realistic gold materials I’ve found for Blender. If you have any suggestions on other gold shaders, leave a comment below. Again, thanks to those who voted on the site redesign. If you haven’t voted, be sure to do so soon; I plan on leaving the poll up until the end of April.

Projects Update #6

Ok, to start off: I was sick this weekend. So, there is not a whole lot of progress on anything, except me getting better. 🙂 I did improve my Blender Guru competition entry quite a bit, and also worked a little on the tank. Continue reading to see what I did while I was sick.

Material Study: Diamond v2

Last week I released a diamond material. I got a few comments suggesting some changes, so I thought I would go back and tweak some things. So here it is: v2 of the diamond shader. Continue reading to see what I changed and download the shader.

Material Study: Diamond

EDIT: I will be releasing v2 of this shader on Thursday, February 19, 2015.

Looks good, right? 😉 (BTW, I used a solid background color) I previously did a material study post and really liked how it turned out, but I noticed that the materials didn’t quite work when putting them in the same scene. The reason? Each material had a different real world size, and when I made them different from what they should be, the material just looked off. So, I’ve decided to do them individually and go more in-depth. Continue reading to see how to use my first solo material study.

Material Study #1

This is a simple material study I did after being inspired by Reynante’s work. I hope you like them, and if you have any suggestions I would welcome feedback.

Also, these are not all my idea, I’ve borrowed and tweaked other shaders as well as created completely original ones.