Book Image

Blender 3D By Example - Second Edition

By : Oscar Baechler, Xury Greer
Book Image

Blender 3D By Example - Second Edition

By: Oscar Baechler, Xury Greer

Overview of this book

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.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)

Setting up Blender for the retopology workflow

To fix the topology of the baby dragon, we will go through the process of retopology. Retopology (also known as retopo, or sometimes just retop for short) is the process of building new topology on top of a model that has bad topology. This is almost always necessary after completing a high-resolution (thousands or millions of polygons) sculpture.

The process is not particularly complicated: we create new polygons and snap them to the surface of the high-res model. When we're finished, we will have constructed a new version of the model that has good topology at a low resolution (a few hundred or a couple of thousand polygons). You can see the results of this process in the following diagram:

The baby dragon before and after the retopology process (left side 1,882,102 tris; right side 23,868 tris)

After we create the low-resolution...