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)

Exploring subdivision surfaces

The Catmull–Clark Subdivision Surface algorithm was invented by some of the very talented engineers at Pixar. It has been a very important innovation in the 3D industry, as it provides you with a way in which to make models look smoother. This is achieved by taking input geometry and dividing all of the polygons into smaller polygons. Then, the spacing between the vertices of these new polygons is averaged to create a smooth result.

This algorithm works especially well with quadrilaterals. Each quad can be divided vertically and horizontally at the same time, which turns a single quad into a small grid of four quads. This algorithm can be repeated for multiple levels of subdivision. A second iteration on a quad will result in 16 small quads in a very clean grid pattern, as you can view in the following diagram:

Figure 5.16 – A quad with various levels of subdivision

Generally, two levels of the subdivision are...