▶Book Description
Blender is a powerful 3D creation package that supports every aspect of the 3D pipeline. With this book, you'll learn about modeling, rigging, animation, rendering, and much more with the help of some interesting projects.
This practical guide, based on the Blender 2.83 LTS version, starts by helping you brush up on your basic Blender skills and getting you acquainted with the software toolset. You’ll use basic modeling tools to understand the simplest 3D workflow by customizing a Viking themed scene. You'll get a chance to see the 3D modeling process from start to finish by building a time machine based on provided concept art. You will design your first 2D character while exploring the capabilities of the new Grease Pencil tools. The book then guides you in creating a sleek modern kitchen scene using EEVEE, Blender’s new state-of-the-art rendering engine. As you advance, you'll explore a variety of 3D design techniques, such as sculpting, retopologizing, unwrapping, baking, painting, rigging, and animating to bring a baby dragon to life.
By the end of this book, you'll have learned how to work with Blender to create impressive computer graphics, art, design, and architecture, and you'll be able to use robust Blender tools for your design projects and video games.
▶What You Will Learn
- Explore core 3D modeling tools in Blender such as extrude, bevel, and loop cut
- Understand Blender's Outliner hierarchy, collections, and modifiers
- Find solutions to common problems in modeling 3D characters and designs
- Implement lighting and probes to liven up an architectural scene using EEVEE
- Produce a final rendered image complete with lighting and post-processing effects
- Learn character concept art workflows and how to use the basics of Grease Pencil
- Learn how to use Blender's built-in texture painting tools
▶Key Features
- Learn the basics of 3D design and navigate your way around the Blender interface
- Understand how 3D components work and how to create 3D content for your games
- Familiarize yourself with 3D Modeling, Texturing, Lighting, Rendering and Sculpting with Blender
▶Who This Book Is For
Whether you're completely new to Blender, or an animation veteran enticed by Blender's newest features, this book will have something for you.
▶What this book covers
- Chapter 1, Introduction to 3D and the Blender User Interface, explains the basics of Blender's interface, tools, and workflow conventions.
- Chapter 2, Editing a Viking Scene with a Basic 3D Workflow, will take a look at a 3D scene and let us get used to navigating and transforming objects.
- Chapter 3, Modeling a Time Machine – Part 1, is the beginning of a two-part project in which we will model an object based on provided reference images. We will cover many of the essential modeling tools needed for creating 3D objects.
- Chapter 4, Modeling a Time Machine – Part 2, is the second half of the time machine project. We will build on our modeling knowledge and discover non-destructive workflows.
- Chapter 5, Modern Kitchen – Part 1: Kitbashing, will show how to plan a complete scene and model the necessary assets to complete a kitchen layout.
- Chapter 6, Modern Kitchen – Part 2: Materials and Textures, is a deep dive into material nodes and explains how to create all kinds of materials to decorate our kitchen with.
- Chapter 7, Modern Kitchen – Part 3: Lighting and Rendering, is the final chapter in the kitchen series. We will produce a final rendered image complete with lighting and post-processing effects.
- Chapter 8, Illustrating an Alien Hero with Grease Pencil, is the first of our three chapters that dives into the brand new feature set known as Grease Pencil. We will learn about character concept art workflows and how to use the basics of Grease Pencil.
- Chapter 9, Animating an Exquisite Corpse in Grease Pencil, builds on the previous chapter's workflows and dives into animation and key frames with a loose and fun animation style.
- Chapter 10, Animating a Stylish Short with Grease Pencil, wraps up the Grease Pencil projects in this book. We will cover more advanced workflows and explain how to animate something with more structure than the previous chapter.
- Chapter 11, Creating a Baby Dragon – Part 1: Sculpting, is the beginning of the biggest project in this book. We'll start with an introduction to sculpting. We'll see an overview of the brushes and learn how to create our very own baby dragon design, which we will take all the way to a game-ready asset by the final chapter.
- Chapter 12, Creating a Baby Dragon – Part 2: Retopology, is a shift into the more technical side of 3D character creation. We'll learn about shrink-wrapping, surface snapping, and rules of topology to transform the sculpted baby dragon into a low-poly mesh that can be used in a production pipeline.
- Chapter 13, Creating a Baby Dragon – Part 3: UV Unwrapping, is where we'll prepare the model for texture painting. We'll learn how to cut seams, unwrap UVs, lay out islands, and use checker patterns to check for distortion.
- Chapter 14, Creating a Baby Dragon – Part 4: Baking and Painting Textures, gets back to the artistic side of things. We'll start by baking texture maps that can be used as masks in our texture painting workflow. We'll use Blender's built-in texture painting tools, and we'll add some color and surface detail to the baby dragon.
- Chapter 15, Creating a Baby Dragon – Part 5: Rigging and Animation, is the final baby dragon chapter. We'll get to see all of our hard work pay off and rig the dragon so that it can be posed and animated. To wrap it up, we'll animate a fly cycle so that we can see the character in action.
- Chapter 16, The Wide World of Blender, shows off some of the areas that this book couldn't cover in detail. Even a book this size can barely scratch the surface of what a 3D suite such as Blender can do, but we'll have a look at some inspiring extra features before we're done.
