What this book covers
Chapter 1, Modeling the 3D Asset, guides you through the elements of the default interface and what they do. It then covers the basic tools and techniques used for modeling by going through the process of modeling a pair of headphones from scratch.
Chapter 2, Optimizing Your Asset for Better Rendering Performance, covers different ways of optimizing the asset made in the previous chapter if excessive geometry is present.
Chapter 3, UV Unwrapping Your 3D Asset, covers how to properly unwrap the optimized 3D model to prepare it for texturing, by first looking at primitive shapes and applying similar logic to unwrap the headphones. We will also cover how to manipulate the UV map to better occupy the 1:1 UV space.
Chapter 4, Texturing Your 3D Asset Using PBR and Procedural Textures, covers two distinct methods of applying textures to a 3D model: procedural, by using math to generate the necessary texture maps, and PBR, using pre-made texture maps.
Chapter 5, Texture Painting and Using Real-Life Images as Textures, goes over two more methods of texturing an asset: texture painting, which consists of painting the textures manually and offers absolute control over how the textures look, and using real-life images, in which we use and manipulate one real-life image to use as a texture and to generate the necessary maps.
Chapter 6, Introduction to Blender’s Sculpting Tools, covers in depth the main tools Blender has available by default used for sculpting, such as the different brushes and how they behave when applied and their settings, to control that behavior.
Chapter 7, Making the Base Mesh for a Humanoid Character, covers the most important aspects of the human anatomy in order to make a believable character, going in depth into the different muscles, how they work, and how they affect the shape of their surroundings in the human body, as well as the general body proportions and the main differences between male and female bodies, which we’ll use to start blocking out male and female base meshes.
Chapter 8, Refining the Base Meshes, goes over how to refine the base meshes we blocked out previously, adding detail and making heavy use of the anatomy studied in the previous chapter to add the necessary details and to make sure we have a decent, believable result.
Chapter 9, Optimizing the Base Meshes, covers the process of optimizing the geometry of the sculpted base meshes using a method known as retopology, where we reconstruct the body from scratch with a much cleaner topology, using the sculpt as a base. We'll also be covering how to recover the detail lost during the retopology process, followed by how to properly unwrap the base meshes.
Chapter 10, Rigging the Base Meshes, goes over the different types of movable joints in the human body, explaining their movements, limitations, and respective locations in the human body, to then add a rig to our optimized base mesh to move its different parts and limbs according to the limitations explained. We’ll then cover how to add IK to different parts of the rig in order to pose it easily and how to generate a full-body rig using the built-in Rigify add-on.
Chapter 11, Further Development as a 3D Artist, suggests useful sources of knowledge in order to build up and improve the skills learned throughout this book.