Welcome to the wonderful world of Blender! This book will guide you through the majority of the 3D tools and techniques by creating four concrete projects. Blender is a very powerful and Open Source software, that is, it is totally free. You can even sell your productions with this! This is a very good alternative to other famous 3D solutions.
One of Blender's strengths is that it can cover any multimedia productions such as animation movies, games, or commercials. Moreover, Blender is very stable, frequently updated, available anywhere around the world with an internet connection, and it is lightweight. The Blender Foundation, which is in charge of the official development of the software, often produces short films that are entirely made with Blender. The last one was the amazing film, Cosmos Laundromat, which proved us again that Blender is capable of meeting the needs of an ambitious professional production. During the production of these short films, the software evolved with new tools and optimizations.
Despite the fact that Blender is an amazing program with tremendous possibilities, it is nothing more than a tool that will help you to realize an idea or a project. It is important to work on the artistic aspect of your creations. That's why this book will not just cover the technical dimensions of the software.
With a little bit of practice, Blender will be very efficient in terms of productivity and artistic freedom, so don't worry, you have made a good choice! This book will give you everything you need to start creating your own 3D projects.
We hope that you will enjoy reading this book as much as we have enjoyed writing it.
Good reading and trust yourself!
Chapter 1, Straight into Blender!, discovers the fundamentals of 3D creation and covers how to navigate in the Blender user interface.
Chapter 2, Robot Toy – Modeling of an Object, teaches the basic polygonal modeling tools of Blender. In this chapter, you will model a complete Robot Toy starting from a 2D concept.
Chapter 3, Alien Character – Base Mesh Creation and Sculpting, helps you to understand the sculpting tools of Blender while sculpting an alien character. In order to have the best result, this chapter provides an introduction to anatomy as well.
Chapter 4, Alien Character – Creating a Proper Topology and Transferring the Sculpt Details, covers how to create a clean version of the sculpted model that can be used for animation or game. Moreover, this chapter explains how to unwrap UVs so that a normal and ambient occlusion map can be baked.
Chapter 5, Haunted House – Modeling of the Scene, covers more advanced modeling tools such as curves, in order to model a full haunted house scene.
Chapter 6, Haunted House – Putting Colors on It, improves the haunted house scene using the texturing tools of Blender. Some techniques to produce hand painted tiled textures are explained as well.
Chapter 7, Haunted House – Adding Materials and Lights in Cycles, explains how lights work in order to light the scene. This chapter also provides a basic comprehension of the Cycles render engine and its node-based material creation process.
Chapter 8, Rat Cowboy – Learning to Rig a Character for Animation, covers the creation of a full bipedal rig by hand using bones, constraints, shape keys, and custom shapes.
Chapter 9, Rat Cowboy – Animate a Full Sequence, covers the preproduction stage of animation. Then after explaining the principles of animation, this chapter dives into the animation of a full sequence using the different tools that Blender has to offer.
Chapter 10, Rat Cowboy – Rendering, Compositing, and Editing, covers more advanced techniques to create a fur or a skin material. Then it explains how to polish and edit the sequence using the nodal composting and the editing tools of Blender.
The only necessary thing to have is the last official release of Blender (2.75, at the time of writing). You can download it from http://www.blender.org/download. A pen tablet is highly recommended for Chapter 3, Alien Character – Base Mesh Creation and Sculpting.
This book will provide beginners with the necessary skills and knowledge to create their own 3D projects with Blender. You don't need to have any previous experience in 3D in general, 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.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We will rename this shader HouseRoof1."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "We will click on the Use node button in order to work in the Node editor."
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