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)

Using transformation hotkeys

Unlike the previous chapter, we're going to start this project from scratch, so open Blender, and if you don't already have a fresh scene, go to File | New | General. The default scene has a default cube, a point light, and a camera.

Before we get started on the time machine, let's introduce a few important hotkeys. As stated in the previous chapter, Blender is full of hotkeys. To take full advantage of the software, you'll want to memorize several of them.

Hotkeys are especially useful for things that you will be doing over and over again, in particular, switching between the three transformation tools (move, scale, and rotate), so let's go over how to use these hotkeys so we can work faster:

  • G: Grab (Translate / Move)
  • R: Rotate
  • S: Scale
As always, remember to hover your mouse inside the 3D Viewport before pressing any of...