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)

What are UVs?

A common misconception is that UV stands for ultraviolet. But, in the context of 3D, UV actually doesn't stand for anything. As we learned earlier in this book, we use the X, Y, and Z coordinates to describe where a model is in three-dimensional space, but we also have a U and a V coordinate to represent a model in two-dimensional space.

Why do we need to represent a model in two-dimensional space, you ask? Because that is how three-dimensional software attaches textures to a model. The two extra coordinates, U and V, are used to locate areas of a two-dimensional texture and map them onto a model's three-dimensional coordinates. However, before we can map a texture, we have to unwrap the model to create UVs.

A fun way to visualize this is with holiday candies:

This snowman candy can be unwrapped to see the texture

Pretty cool, right? Who knew you could...