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

Nodes in Blender

Nodes are like pieces of materials. They’re simple, modular building blocks that each perform a specific function. You connect their sockets to build more complicated materials. There are two default nodes in the Shader Editor: Principled Shader and Material Output. For simple projects, like the ones in this book, you won’t need any more nodes than these.

Let’s start with the Principled BSDF node.

The Principled BSDF node

The Principled BSDF node is the most useful shader node. BSDF stands for the Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Function, and it’s a program that calculates how light bounces off a surface.

It’s not too hard to see why BSDF exists. Shader nodes are the only kind of node you can connect to the Surface output.

The Principled BSDF node has a lot of inputs, as shown in Figure 6.4:

Figure 6.4: The Principled BSDF node

Figure 6.4: The Principled BSDF node

However, most of the time, you’ll only be focusing...