Book Image

Low Poly 3D Modeling in Blender

By : Samuel Sullins
Book Image

Low Poly 3D Modeling in Blender

By: Samuel Sullins

Overview of this book

Step into the world of low poly 3D art with Low Poly 3D Modeling in Blender—your entry point into Blender and mastering the fundamentals of 3D art. This beginner-friendly guide ensures that you’re fully prepared for the creative adventure that follows. Through a step-by-step learning process starting with the principles of low poly art, this book gradually immerses you in the intricacies of modeling. As you progress, you’ll gain hands-on experience creating diverse projects ranging from designing a simple 3D crate to rendering complete low poly scenes. The book covers a wide spectrum of topics as you navigate Blender's interface, mastering essential modeling tools and exploring both basic and advanced modeling techniques. Advancing to the final chapters, you’ll find ways to breathe life into your models with material creation and gain practical insights into modeling a variety of low poly objects. From end-to-end scene construction to configuring Blender for rendering high-quality images, you’ll be equipped with the foundational skills to propel your career in 3D modeling and explore the boundless creative possibilities that Blender offers. By the end of this book, you'll have a solid understanding of Blender, 3D modeling, low poly methodologies, material design, 3D rendering techniques, and the broader world of 3D art.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1:Getting Started with Low Poly Modeling
5
Part 2:Modeling and Shading for Low Poly
9
Part 3:Creating Your Own Assets
15
Part 4:Building a Complete Low Poly Scene

Fine-tuning the model

Our model could be considered done. It checks all the boxes – it’s mushroom-shaped and low poly. However, it’s still a very blocky, regular shape. It’s boring and uninteresting to look at.

We can take it a step further with something I call artistic modeling.

We’ll mess with the way the faces are positioned, how they’re shaped, and how many vertices they have. We’ll achieve a slightly more visually pleasing look, or at least something a little more interesting, using these techniques.

The first step is triangulation. But first, you need to learn some terminology.

Faces have different names depending on how many sides they have:

  • A three-sided face is often called a triangle, or just a tri
  • A face with four sides is known as a quad
  • All faces with five or more sides are simply called n-gons (the word comes from polygon, with poly replaced by n, which means an arbitrary number of sides)
  • ...