Book Image

Sculpting the Blender Way

By : Xury Greer
Book Image

Sculpting the Blender Way

By: Xury Greer

Overview of this book

Sculpting the Blender Way is a detailed step-by-step guide for creating digital art with the latest Blender 3D sculpting features. With over 400 reference images, 18 Sculpting in Action videos, and dozens of 3D sculpture example files, this book is an invaluable resource for traditional and digital sculptors looking to try their hand at sculpting in Blender. The first part of the book will teach you how to navigate Blender's user interface and familiarize yourself with the core workflows, as well as gain an understanding of how the sculpting features work, including basic sculpting, Dyntopo, the Voxel Remesher, QuadriFlow, and Multiresolution. You’ll also learn about a wide range of brushes and all of the latest additions to the sculpting feature set, such as Face Sets, Mesh Filters, and the Cloth brush. The next chapters will show you how to customize these brushes and features to create fantastic 3D sculptures that you can share with the ever-growing Blender community. By the end of this book, you'll have gained a complete understanding of the core sculpting workflows and be able to use Blender to bring your digital characters to life.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

An overview of topology

In Chapter 2, Overview of Blender's Sculpting Workflows, we learned a little bit about topology. In the Creating dynamic topology with Dyntopo section of that chapter, we learned that Topology is a term we use to describe how all of the components (such as vertices, edges, and faces) of a mesh are interconnected. The topology of a model is not the same thing as the shape of the model. The positions of vertices, edges, and faces can move around and deform without changing the topology as long as none of the connecting edges are removed, rearranged, or added. For example, in the following diagram, we can observe two mesh objects with identical topology but different shapes:

Figure 5.1 – Two objects with the same topology but different shapes

In this example, the object on the left-hand side is made out of 16 quadrilaterals (quads). The topology of these quads forms a simple grid pattern. The object on the right-hand side has...