Shading, Lighting, And Rendering With Blender Cycles

In this Citizen tutorial series you’ll learn to create a little turtle character that could make a perfect fit for your next animated short. You’ll be taken through the complete workflow for creating the character. First you’ll go through box modeling the character and sculpting in details. Next learn how use UV unwrapping, baking and texturing to texture the character. This is followed by shading, lighting, and rendering the scene in Cycles. Finally you’ll rig the character and animate a short walk cycle along a path, complete with lip syncing for a short audio clip.

Kent Trammell will walk you through the shading, lighting and rendering of refractive materials. First you will see how easy it can be to set up a basic glass shader with the Glass BSDF. Then you’ll see how to gain more control by building a custom glass shader with the Refractive and Glossy BSDFs. All along the way you’ll become familiar with optimizing Cycle’s render settings for best performance verses best result. As a bonus you’ll be walked through a brilliant technique for faking believable caustics introduced by Bassam Kurdali on the Tube Open Movie blog.