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)

Summary

This adorable hatchling is finally ready to take to the sky and rain down fireballs. Think about the next steps you could carry out to make this setup even better. A detailed texture, much smaller in scale via mapping, could be overlaid for the specular, roughness, and normal maps so that it retains an organic fidelity even when zoomed in. Clever textures might save the specular, roughness, and subsurface maps as R, G, and B channels in a single .png. The color choices for the top and underbelly could be made modular with a mask for the pattern. The various auxiliary maps we baked, saved externally now, could be removed to speed the shader up. A sophisticated node tree could even break down the dragon's elemental powers into a single node group attribute.

Next up, we'll set the baby dragon up with a customized character rig. At last, our fully realized baby dragon...