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)

Baking texture maps from high poly to low poly

Baking is the process of translating mesh information into image textures. All sorts of data can be extracted in this process and can be applied in a number of conventional and creative ways. Even if you're painting a texture by hand, a baked map provides a helpful guide for where model details are. A big part of the baking workflow is to bake from a high-poly mesh to a low-poly mesh; the high-poly mesh is usually unusable in production due to size. By baking that detail to maps, we get the functionality of the low-poly mesh with the details of the high-poly mesh. Some of the maps we create will immediately be used in our dragon's final material. Others will serve as auxiliary textures, creating images that we'll use for starting points and masks when painting the final textures. The first map we need to bake is called...