Sculpting the Blender Way

Xury Greer

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781801071284
• Topic: Informatique
• Subtopic: Applications de bureau

Get started with the latest sculpting features in Blender 3D and learn key sculpting workflows such as Dynotopo, Voxel Remesher, QuadriFlow, and Multiresolution

Key Features

• Use Blender's core sculpting workflows: basic sculpting, Dynotopo, Voxel Remesher, QuadriFlow, and Multiresolution
• Learn how to use and customize Blender's sculpting brushes to create fantastic art effortlessly
• Explore common techniques in Blender 3.0 for creating facial features, clothing, accessories, and more

Book Description

Sculpting the Blender Way is a detailed step-by-step guide for creating digital art with the latest Blender 3D sculpting features. With over 400 reference images, 18 Sculpting in Action videos, and dozens of 3D sculpture example files, this book is an invaluable resource for traditional and digital sculptors looking to try their hand at sculpting in Blender.The first part of the book will teach you how to navigate Blender's user interface and familiarize yourself with the core workflows, as well as gain an understanding of how the sculpting features work, including basic sculpting, Dyntopo, the Voxel Remesher, QuadriFlow, and Multiresolution.You'll also learn about a wide range of brushes and all of the latest additions to the sculpting feature set, such as Face Sets, Mesh Filters, and the Cloth brush. The next chapters will show you how to customize these brushes and features to create fantastic 3D sculptures that you can share with the ever-growing Blender community.By the end of this book, you'll have gained a complete understanding of the core sculpting workflows and be able to use Blender to bring your digital characters to life.

What you will learn

• Configure your graphics tablet for use in 3D sculpting
• Set up Blender's user interface for sculpting
• Understand the core Blender sculpting workflows
• Familiarize yourself with Blender's basic sculpting brushes
• Customize brushes for more advanced workflows
• Explore high-resolution details with brush alphas and Multiresolution
• Try out the all-new Cloth brush
• Render your finished artwork for and make it portfolio-ready

Who this book is for

This book is for artists who want to get started with the exciting new sculpting features in Blender 3D. Whether you have experience using ZBrush or traditional sculpting, or are completely new to sculpting, this book will have something new for you to learn. Prior experience with Blender or other 3D software may be helpful but is not required. However, a graphics tablet from Wacom, XP-Pen, or Huion is highly recommended to be able to follow along the concepts and examples covered in the book.

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Chapter 1: Exploring Blender's User Interface for Sculpting

Welcome to Sculpting the Blender Way. Blender is a free and open-source 3D modeling suite, which means it has tools for creating 3D art with many different workflows. The sculpting workflow is widely considered to be the most fun and artistic approach. Blender includes all of the sculpting features you need to create amazing organic 3D artwork and characters. Blender has seen countless improvements to the sculpting process over the last year, so now is an excellent time to learn how to sculpt in Blender.

In this chapter, we will learn how to use Blender's user interface as it pertains to sculpting. No prior knowledge of 3D modeling or sculpting is required to follow along with this book, so don't worry if this is your first experience making 3D art of any kind. The Blender Foundation has created a list of features that you can read about here: https://www.blender.org/features/. This book will be focusing on the sculpting feature set, so we will not be going in depth on the other features. All concepts and workflows in this book will be introduced from the perspective of 3D sculpting.

We'll start with how to install the software. Next, we'll learn about the editors within Blender's user interface and how we can customize the interface for a streamlined sculpting workflow. We'll learn about Blender's powerful viewport customization features for shading and overlays. We'll have a look at the Toolbar and the Sidebar within the 3D Viewport. And we'll practice navigation in 3D since we will be doing that a lot during our sculpting workflow. We'll wrap up this chapter by learning the importance of using a graphics tablet and how to set up the drivers for the best sculpting experience.

By the end of this chapter, you'll have a foundational understanding of the Blender software and its user interface, and you'll be prepared to try out the sculpting features in the next chapter.

The topics in this chapter are as follows:

• Installing Blender
• Understanding Blender's user interface
• Expanding and collapsing the Toolbar and the Sidebar
• Exploring the viewport shading modes
• Customizing solid shading mode with the pop-over menu
• Using viewport overlays
• Navigating the 3D Viewport
• Setting up your graphics tablet's stylus buttons

Technical requirements

For sculpting in Blender, you will of course need a computer that can run the latest version of Blender. Blender works on all major operating systems, including Windows 8.1, 10, and 11, macOS 10.13+, and Linux. 3D sculpting primarily utilizes the CPU and RAM. A high-end graphics card (GPU) can help for rendering and viewport performance but isn't as important for sculpting performance as the CPU and RAM. You can read more about Blender's hardware requirements here: https://www.blender.org/download/requirements/.

We will need a recent version of Blender that has the latest sculpting features. The features we need are available in Blender version 2.93 and later. Blender 2.93 is a Long-Term Support (LTS) release, so it will get continued support and fixes until June 2023. Blender does not currently have an auto-updater, so if you've downloaded Blender before, you should check that you have at least version 2.93.6 before following along with this book.

Important Note

Blender receives several major features updates every year; version 3.0 will be released around the same time as this book's publication. Version 3.0 begins a new series of Blender releases; it comes with many new features and a slightly adjusted color scheme for the user interface. However, all of the sculpting information and examples in this book will be will still be 100% relevant and up to date for Blender 3.0.

It is possible to follow along with this book using a mouse, but it is highly recommended that you use a graphics tablet for all sculpting. Because this book is primarily about the sculpting features in Blender, you will not get the intended experience unless you have a graphics tablet.

This book includes several files that we've prepared for you to help demonstrate some of the sculpting features. You can download the files to follow along with this book at the GitHub link here: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Sculpting-the-Blender-Way.

Installing Blender

First, we'll need to download the latest version of Blender. Blender is available through the Blender Foundation's official website. You do not need to register an account or pay license fees or anything like that; Blender is 100% free and open source!

Getting ready

Make sure your computer meets the requirements for Blender, as mentioned in the Technical requirements section, and then head over to the download page of the Blender website: https://www.blender.org/download/. The website will automatically detect your computer's operating system so you don't have to worry about choosing the correct version.

Now, let's install Blender.

How to do it…

To install Blender from the Blender Foundation website, follow these instructions:

1. Navigate to https://www.blender.org/download/.
2. Click on the Download Blender... button.
3. Once the installer file has been downloaded, click to open the installation wizard.
4. Follow the prompts in the installation wizard to finish installing Blender.

If you prefer to use a portable version of Blender that you can install to a thumb drive, follow these instructions:

1. Click on the macOS, Linux, and other versions drop-down list.
2. Choose the Windows Portable (.zip) option.
3. Once the .zip file finishes downloading, unzip it to your portable thumb drive so that you can take it with you.
4. Blender can be launched from your thumb drive by double-clicking on the blender.exe executable file.

And that's all there is to it! Congratulations – you're ready to use Blender!

How it works…

The installer version of Blender will automatically put the appropriate files into your computer's default program files directory. The portable version keeps all of the unzipped files in a portable directory so that you can take Blender with you on a thumb drive.

There's more...

Alternatively, Blender can be installed via the...