The Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook is now available for free on Packt for free for a little over 5 more hours you have to have an account on Packit this a legitimate offer not a scam so pick up your copy today it is a digital verision and I know the full price on this book is over $40

Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook

OOPs I missed this.

I had just got it so lucked out and nice thing is even thou it was digital format you could have gotten it in PDF, EPUB, Mobi or Kindle so you could on any reader or PC this is a good resource book to have in your library. I will post any others from Packt that I come across since these usually sell for $40 and up

Looks like I missed this too. I'll have to keep an eye out for another offer of it.

If you create an account with packt you can sign up for their newsletter and they offer a wide variety of free offers and as well as deep discount offer on their library of books and videos if I come across any that are Blender specific I will try and post them as soon as I can so everyone can take advantage of them

Thanks for the info Lobo, as I'm always looking for new tutorials, as you know, and Cycles is still very new to me, as is SuperFly in Poser, so any help I can get is always a plus.

Their books are on sale on Amazon all the time too and often have an additional Prime discount - I got a bunch of them several months ago for around $15 each. Just be careful because there are several editions of some of them with slight changes in the name but almost no actual text changes - if the description sounds like it might be the same thing as another one, it probably is, but it won't straight up say that.

Also, most of the "cookbook" ones seem to be good resources if you are just looking for a solution for something, but they rarely explain they "why" - they are very much of the "click this,", "enter 5," "click this" school, so they are not good learning tools for the beginner in my experience.

Miss B posted at 10:22AM Sun, 09 October 2016 - #4286148

Thanks for the info Lobo, as I'm always looking for new tutorials, as you know, and Cycles is still very new to me, as is SuperFly in Poser, so any help I can get is always a plus.

As you may know Superfly is Cycles for Poser and most cycles set ups can be used in Poser so learning one is pretty much the same to learning the other there are 3 free tutorials available here done by Mark Bremmer that are very good explaining Superfly Rendering

Lobo3433 posted at 12:54PM Sun, 09 October 2016 - #4286171

Miss B posted at 10:22AM Sun, 09 October 2016 - #4286148

Thanks for the info Lobo, as I'm always looking for new tutorials, as you know, and Cycles is still very new to me, as is SuperFly in Poser, so any help I can get is always a plus.

As you may know Superfly is Cycles for Poser and most cycles set ups can be used in Poser so learning one is pretty much the same to learning the other there are 3 free tutorials available here done by Mark Bremmer that are very good explaining Superfly Rendering

Yes, I'm aware the Poser SuperFly is based on Cycles, and of Mark Bremmer's tutorials, so yes, learning one will help me with getting a handle on the other. I've been following one of the threads on the SM Poser Forum by a member who's been playing with different shaders utilizing the CyclesSurface root node, so I'm learning a little at a time.

As for Cycles in Blender, I've only tried one tutorial, to model a coffee cup and then render with Cyles, and it didn't come out bad at all, but I need to play with it more in Blender as well.

MDO2010 posted at 1:01PM Sun, 09 October 2016 - #4286170

Their books are on sale on Amazon all the time too and often have an additional Prime discount - I got a bunch of them several months ago for around $15 each. Just be careful because there are several editions of some of them with slight changes in the name but almost no actual text changes - if the description sounds like it might be the same thing as another one, it probably is, but it won't straight up say that.

Also, most of the "cookbook" ones seem to be good resources if you are just looking for a solution for something, but they rarely explain they "why" - they are very much of the "click this,", "enter 5," "click this" school, so they are not good learning tools for the beginner in my experience.

Thanks for the heads-up Mark. I'm familiar with PAKCT books, though I was looking more at their Python books yesterday, as I'd like to try my hand at it. I've been programming for years in several web related languages, but I'm looking for a beginner's book, and then eventually learn to create addons for some of my 3D software that utilizes Python scripting. The one organization where I learned my web related programming languages, however, doesn't offer it, so I'm thinking a good book might be useful. We shall see, but I will keep your comments in mind.

Yes cycles in Blender does take allot of practice I know I still have to work more with it I have a rendered image in my gallery of a simple tunnel based on Andrew Prices subway tunnel tutorial and even thou I think it is a nice render it is not 100% to my linking the tunnel it self looks like one style while for some reason the tunnel lights came out looking cartoonish so have yet to figure out the balance but that is one of the fun things about learning and playing with Blender

Here's what I wound up with after doing the tutorial, which IIRC, suggested about 100 or 150 samples, and then I tried it with about 300 samples. I finally did it with 1,000 samples, but the inside of the mug is still a little grainy, so not sure how high I should've gone with the samples to get rid of the grainess.

Cycles Coffee Mug

BTW, I was just over at PACKT to see what the new free book is, and low and behold, it's a Python book. Unfortunately, it's not a beginner's book, so not sure whether to get it and put it away until I'm ready for it, or not. Hmmmmm . . . decisions, decision.