Blender 3D By Example
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Blender 3D By Example

Romain Caudron, Pierre-Armand Nicq

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eBook - ePub

Blender 3D By Example

Romain Caudron, Pierre-Armand Nicq

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About This Book

Design a complete workflow with Blender to create stunning 3D scenes and films step-by-step!

About This Book

  • Give life to a character within a full animated short film by learning the rigging and animation process
  • Make use of the powerful tools available in Blender to produce professional-quality 3D characters and environments
  • Discover advanced techniques by adding fur to a character, creating a grass field, and fine-tuning a shot with post-processing effects to enhance your creations

Who This Book Is For

This book will give any beginner the necessary skills and knowledge to create own 3D projects with Blender. You don't need to have any previous experience in 3D modeling, but if you do, then this book is a great way get you started with Blender. This book is for anyone who wants to learn Blender by creating concrete projects.

What You Will Learn

  • Understand the basics of 3D and how to navigate your way around the Blender interface
  • Create a 3D robot toy model from start to finish using the basic modeling tools of Blender
  • Make a full alien character using the skin mesh modifier and the sculpting tools with an artistic approach
  • Use re-topology techniques to create a clean 3D version of the previously sculpted alien
  • Model a full haunted house and its environment using more advanced modeling tools and techniques such as the Array Modifier, Instance duplication, or Curves
  • Discover the power of the texture paint tool in order to add color to the haunted house
  • Get to know the Cycles render engine by creating different materials for the house and the environment

In Detail

Blender is a powerful tool, stable, with an integral workflow that will allow you to understand your learning of 3D creation with serenity. Today, it is considered to be one of the most complete 3D packages on the market and it is free and open source! It is very efficient for many types of productions, such as 3D animated or live action films, architecture, research, or even game creation with its integrated game engine and its use of the Python language. Moreover, Blender has an active community that contributes to expanding its functionalities. Today, it is used in many professional products and by many companies.

Through this book, you will create many types of concert projects using a step-by-step approach. You will start by getting to know the modeling tools available in Blender as you create a 3D robot toy. Then, you will discover more advanced techniques such as sculpting and re-topology by creating a funny alien character. After that, you will create a full haunted house scene.

For the last project, you will create a short film featuring a rat cowboy shooting cheese in a rat trap! This will be a more complex project in which you learn how to rig, animate, compose advanced material, composite, and edit a full sequence.

Each project in this book will give you more practice and increase your knowledge of the Blender tools. By the end of this book, you will master a workflow that you will be able to apply to your own creations.

Style and approach

This is an easy-to-follow book that is based on four concrete projects, with increasing levels of difficulty. Each chapter will teach you how to create these projects step-by-step. New tools and techniques are introduced in a theoretical and practical way, so you can apply them in your own projects later.

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Information

Year
2015
ISBN
9781785285073
Edition
1

Blender 3D By Example


Table of Contents

Blender 3D By Example
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Support files, eBooks, discount offers, and more
Why subscribe?
Free access for Packt account holders
Preface
What this book covers
What you need for this book
Who this book is for
Conventions
Reader feedback
Customer support
Downloading the color images of this book
Errata
Piracy
Questions
1. Straight into Blender!
An overview of the 3D workflow
The anatomy of a 3D scene
What can you do with Blender?
Getting used to the navigation in Blender
An introduction to the navigation of the 3D Viewport
What are editors?
The anatomy of an editor
Split, Join, and Detach
Some useful layout presets
Setting up your preferences
An introduction to the Preferences window
Customizing the default navigation style
Improving Blender with add-ons
A brief introduction to the projects
The Robot Toy
The Alien Character
The Haunted House
The Rat Cowboy
Summary
2. Robot Toy – Modeling of an Object
Let's start the modeling of our robot toy
Preparing the workflow by adding an image reference
Adding the head primitive
The Edit Mode versus the Object Mode
Using the basic modeling tools
Modeling the head
Modeling the antenna
An introduction to the Subdivision Surface modifier
Improving the head shape
Modeling the thunderbolts
Modeling the eyes
Modeling the chest
Modeling the neck
Modeling the torso
Modeling the buttons
Modeling the fork
Modeling protections for the fork
Modeling the main wheel
Modeling the arm
Using Blender Internal to render our Robot Toy
Summary
3. Alien Character – Base Mesh Creation and Sculpting
Understanding the sculpting process
An introduction to sculpting
Choosing sculpting over poly modeling
Using a pen tablet
The sculpt mode
Optimizing the viewport
Anatomy of a brush
Dyntopo versus the Multires modifier
First touch with the Multires modifier
First touch with Dyntopo
Creating a base mesh with the Skin modifier
Visual preparation
An introduction to artistic anatomy
Sculpting the body
The head
The torso
The arms
The legs
The belt
Summary
4. Alien Character – Creating a Proper Topology and Transferring the Sculpt Details
Why make a retopology?
Possibilities of arranging polygons
Errors to avoid during the creation of retopology
Density of polygons
Making the retopology of the alien character
Preparing the environment
The head
The neck and the torso
The arms and the hands
The legs
Unwrapping UVs
Understanding UVs
The placement of the seams
The placement and adjustment of the islands
The baking of textures
The baking of a normal map
What is a normal map?
Making of the bake
Displaying the normal map in the viewport
The baking of an ambient occlusion
Understanding the ambient occlusion map
Creation of the bake
Displaying the ambient occlusion in the viewport
Summary
5. Haunted House – Modeling of the Scene
Blocking the house
Working with a scale
Blocking the bases of the house
Refining the blocking
Adding instantiated objects
Reworking the blocking objects
Breaking and ageing the elements
Simulate a stack of wooden planks with physics
Creation of the simulation of a stack of planks
Modeling the environment (8 pages)
Modeling the cliff
Modeling a tree with curves
Enhancing the scene with a barrier, rocks, and a cart
Organizing the scene
Grouping objects
Working with layers
Summary
6. Haunted House – Putting Colors on It
Unwrapping UVs
Using Project From View
Unwrapping the rest of the house
The tree with the Smart UV Project
Unwrapping the rest of the environment
Tiling UVs
What is tiling for?
The UV layers
Adding colors
Basics of the Texture Paint tool
Discovering the brushes
The TexDraw brush
The Smear brush
The Soften brush
The Clone brush
The Fill brush
The Mask brush
The Stroke option
Delimiting the zones of painting according to the geometry
Painting directly on the texture
Painting the scene
Laying down the colors
Tiled textures
The settings of our workspace
Advice for a good tiled texture
Painting the roof-tile texture
Quick tips for other kinds of hand-painted tiled textures
Baking our tiled textures
Why bake?
How to do it?
Creating transparent textures
The grass texture
The grunge texture
Doing a quick render with Blender Internal
Setting lights
Placing the camera
Setting the environment (sky and mist)
Summary
7. Haunted House – Adding Materials and Lights in Cycles
Understanding the basic settings of Cycles
The sampling
Light path settings
Performances
Lighting
Creating a testing material
Understanding the different types of light
Lighting our scene
Painting and using an Image Base Lighting
Creating materials with nodes
Creating the materials of the house, the rocks, and the tree
Adding a mask for the windows
Using procedural textures
Making and applying normal maps in Cycles
Creating realistic grass
Generating the grass with particles
Creating the grass shader
...

Table of contents