Book Image

Blender 3D Basics Beginner's Guide Second Edition

By : Gordon Fisher
Book Image

Blender 3D Basics Beginner's Guide Second Edition

By: Gordon Fisher

Overview of this book

This book teaches you how to model a nautical scene, complete with boats and water, and then add materials, lighting, and animation. It demystifies the Blender interface and explains what each tool does so that you will be left with a thorough understanding of 3D. This book starts with an introduction to Blender and some background on the principles of animation, how they are applied to computer animation, and how these principles make animation better. Furthermore, the book helps you advance through various aspects of animation design such as modeling, lighting, camera work, and animation through the Blender interface with the help of several simple projects. Each project will help you practice what you have learned and do more advanced work in all areas.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Blender 3D Basics Beginner's Guide Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
3
Controlling the Lamp, the Camera, and Animating Objects
Index

Modeling an oar


We'll do a little more precise modeling with the oar. We'll be flipping groups of vertices around to make rich details while keeping the polygon count as low as possible. First, you need to know more about what you are making.

Getting a scale from an image

It's good to be able to make an object of the size you want it to be. As I used a real boat as the basis on which to build the boat model, a picture of an oar will help make a realistic oar, and as you'll discover, you can get quite a bit of information from it.

For a reference image, I went to a website and grabbed an image of an oar similar to the one shown in the following screenshot:

Now, I had to figure out the size of the oar. The specs on the website had the length of the oar and the width of the blade, which was enough information for me to scale things in the image and get the following basic measurements:

  • I trimmed down the image until it was just the oar and got an image that was 1954 x 178 pixels in size. I knew...