Hello and welcome to this quick tip on making shadeless materials for Cycles in Blender!
In this quick tip by Jonathan Williamson we show you how to create materials for Cycles in Blender that are completely shadeless; e.g. they do not receive shadowing or highlights. Shadeless materials are very useful for rendering a scene with a background image or any other numerous uses.
What you’ll learn:
Through this short video tutorial you will learn how to setup shadeless materials in Cycles by using an emit shader and light paths. You will see a quick demonstration of what light paths do and even get a small tease of what our Eat Sheep project looks like at the time of this recording!
Nice… This should come in handy with all the other Cycles tutorials you’re doing. Thanks for taking the time to do Cycles Tutorials — makes the price of CGCookie well worth it!
Keep up the excellent work, Jonathan! We’re all cheering for you!
I’d really like to see a quick tip on ambient occlusion in Cycles… ;D
Ambiant occlusion is an artificial trick in old blender internal render engine to mimick what modern ray tracing engines naturally do when implementing Global Illumination algorithms.
So you’ll have this natively in Cycles. Just try the following: light a cube laying on a plane with an area light, or a sun lamp. Do not use unrealistic point lights or spot lights. Then you’ll get “natural” ambiant occlusion.
Just so people know, AO is in trunk for Cycles. It is a separate pass.
You can bake the ambient occlusion in BI and then use it as a texture in Cycles.
Your interface theme is desirable.
I am sorry, but the theme is ugly!!!
This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!
Good. If you don’t want this material cast shadows you can mix it with a transparent shader and “Is shadow ray” as factor.
Thanks for the tip Jonathan. I figured out I should use an emission plane, but I didn’t take into account the fact that it would actually light other objects in the scene.
with this method, other objects which has shaders such as glossy, will see our plane as black. to solve this problem i found that instead of directly using camera ray as our mix shader factor, we can merge camera and glossy rays with a color mix node using add with 1 factor and use it as mix shader’s factor.
Jonathan-
Thanks for delving into light paths. Up until now, they have really thrown me for a loop.
Cycles is still so young, and learning how to make it work the way we all want it to is going to take time (and will be a blast in the process.) I think users need a cycles materials database (hint hint!), that shows off all these methods.
After watching how simple it was to use light paths, I played around a bit. -http://www.pasteall.org/pic/28136. Quickly came up with a method to reflect an object but have the object doing the reflecting become transparent. Use in architectural renders?
So nice to see a new quick tip, it’s been awhile. As others have said, any cycles tips, material node setups are just really welcome and helpful…keep em coming!
this is hokum,
why not just have a shadeless node and have it setup
the lights paths and all that for you etc..
why all the jumping though hoops?
have a shadeless selection on the right side(material section under outliner)
, and when you click it, it adds the nodes for you automatically..
thanks jonathan, killer lesson,
killer modo theme on the interface
2 heheheee.. i was wondering about
that then you mentioned hehehee
Cheers !!
Jonathan,
Did you make that theme? I like the highlighted orange colors!
Jeremy
Sorry, just watched the video. lol
Hi Jonathan,
could you do a quick video explaining how install Modo theme?
File > User Preferences
Themes TAB > Presets > Theme MODO
Yes, you are right…
but Modo Theme is missing in my list of presets.
I’m using Blender 2.62 R44136 Win 32
I have found how install Modo:
1) Go to http://www.pasteall.org/29446/xml and download file
2) Copy file to ….\Blender\2.62\scripts\presets\interface_theme
3) Open Blender and go to User preferences.
4) Select Modo and “Save as Default”
and that’s all
You don’t need to bother with a Mix Shader node, you know. You can just plug “Is Camera Ray” directly into the strength of the Emission node. You even demonstrated this yourself in the video momentarily!
Thanks!
This is a good example as to why using cycles is a nightmare at times. All that understanding to create a simple shadeless material.
Hope they eventually work in a checkbox for the GUI.
Horrid for beginners. This is the type of stuff that makes noobs want to quit. I understand the value of nodes at certain times, but almost everything else should be accessible from the GUI.
Hi.
Hey Dan,
Another tip:
You’ll get a good result when you disable “Diffuse, Glossy and Shadows” in the object panel.
Properties window -> Object ->Ray Visibility
You can apply that emission material and disable all options in this menu but “Camera”.
You get the same result without Light Path or other tricks with nodes.
Hi.
Another tip:
You’ll get a good result when you disable “Diffuse, Glossy and Shadows” in the object panel.
Properties window -> Object ->Ray Visibility
You can apply that emission material and disable all options in this menu but “Camera”.
You get the same result without Light Path or other tricks with nodes.
how do i make an object not receive light