Book Image

Blender 2.5 HOTSHOT

By : John E. Herreño
Book Image

Blender 2.5 HOTSHOT

By: John E. Herreño

Overview of this book

<p>Blender 2.5 Hotshot will show you how powerful and capable Blender 3D is when you exploit its full potential. Move beyond basic tasks in Blender 3d and dive into more challenging territory. Ditch simple boring characters in favor of creating more detailed, visually rich, and polished results.</p> <p>We will start by covering all the steps involved in producing a complete image from scratch by working on a scene of a starship; then we'll go into working with blueprints by creating an aircraft scene and a car model. Next you will use the video editor by creating a professional looking demo-reel followed by the game engine to create an interactive first person architectural walkthrough.</p> <p>Since each chapter is a complete project you'll also learn to create very nice materials, including multi-layered textures and the usage of color ramps to achieve special effects. On the lighting part you'll be learning various tricks to control how each light behaves and affects the scene, along with some basic setups for common situations. On the modeling part you'll be working both on mechanical and organic objects, learning some key concepts along the way.</p> <p>Compositing is widely used to take normal renders to the next level and add some nice special effects like glare. You will even have the opportunity to write some Python code for the game engine. Finally, you'll work on creating a snail using some advanced texturing tricks and compositing it into real footage.</p>
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Blender 2.5 HOTSHT
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

You Ready To Go Gung HO? A Hotshot Challenge


After all this hard work, there are still some things that you can do to polish the final render even more:

  • How about adding a nice background? (There is a very nice star field map in the wayback machine copy of www.oera.net.)

  • The dark part of the earth is using the same diffuse map as the part of the earth that is being lit. However, it would be great if we applied the diffuse map showing how the cities of the earth are lit in the night to the dark side. This change would surely require major adjustments on the node setup for compositing.

  • The volumetric look of the rim of the earth should cover more than just the rim; it would be great to get it doing that.