Book description
Build your very own stunning characters in Blender from scratch
About This Book
Packed with illustrations and a lot of tips and tricks to make your scenes come to life
Design a complete workflow with Blender to create stunning 3D scenes and films step by step
Gain an understanding of how to create and assign materials automatically, working in both the Blender Internal engine as well as in Cycles
Who This Book Is For
If you are a graphic designer and are looking for a tool to meet your requirements in designing, especially with regards to 3D designing, this course is for you. This course will make use of Blender to meet your design needs.
What You Will Learn
Understand the basics of 3D and how to navigate your way around the Blender interface
Discover the power of the texture paint tool in order to add color to a haunted house
Get to know the Cycles render engine by creating different materials for the house and the environment
Find the best possible flow for your edge-loops to enhance the character features and to get the best possible range of deformation
Mix both the Blender Internal and Cycles rendering engines in order to render materials as quickly as possible
Set up light sources and world global illumination
Build material interfaces for general use in complex materials by grouping the shaders inside groups
Parent and rename the nodes to better organize the Node Editor window
In Detail
Blender is a powerful, stable tool with an integral workflow that will allow you to understand 3D creation with ease. With its integrated game engine and use of the Python language, it is an efficient choice for many productions, including 3D animated or live action films, architecture, research, and even game creation. Blender has an active community that contributes to expanding its functionalities. Today, it is used in many professional products and by many companies.
Throughout Blender for Designers, you will create many types of complete projects using a step-by-step approach. Start by getting to know the modeling tools available in Blender to create a 3D robot toy, and discover more advanced techniques such as sculpting and retopology by creating an alien character.
Move on in the second module to engage with the workflow used to create characters. Run through the process from modeling to the rendering stages, using the tools of the latest official release of Blender.
The last module will teach you how to utilize the power of the Blender series to create a wide variety of materials, textures, and effects using the Cycles rendering engine. You will learn about node-based shader creation, and master Cycles through step-by-step, recipe-based advice. Start small by rendering the textures of stones and water, then scale things up to massive landscapes of mountains and oceans.
This Learning Path combines some of the best that Packt has to offer in one complete, curated package. It includes content from the following Packt products:
Blender 3D By Example By Romain Caudron and Pierre-Armand Nicq
Blender 3D Cookbook By Enrico Valenza
Blender Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook - Third Edition By Enrico Valenza
Style and approach
The course starts with a step-by-step approach to creating concert projects and help you understand the basics of it. With the guided explanation throughout this, each topic is explained with an example.
Downloading the example code for this book. You can download the example code files for all Packt books you have purchased from your account at http://www.PacktPub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.PacktPub.com/support and register to have the code file.
Table of contents
-
Blender 3D: Designing Objects
- Table of Contents
- Blender 3D: Designing Objects
- Blender 3D: Designing Objects
- Credits
- Preface
-
1. Module 1
- 1. Straight into Blender!
-
2. Robot Toy – Modeling of an Object
- Let's start the modeling of our robot toy
-
Using the basic modeling tools
- Modeling the head
- Modeling the antenna
- An introduction to the Subdivision Surface modifier
- Modeling the thunderbolts
- Modeling the eyes
- Modeling the chest
- Modeling the neck
- Modeling the torso
- Modeling the buttons
- Modeling the fork
- Modeling the main wheel
- Modeling the arm
- Using Blender Internal to render our Robot Toy
- Summary
- 3. Alien Character – Base Mesh Creation and Sculpting
- 4. Alien Character – Creating a Proper Topology and Transferring the Sculpt Details
- 5. Haunted House – Modeling of the Scene
- 6. Haunted House – Putting Colors on It
- 7. Haunted House – Adding Materials and Lights in Cycles
- 8. Rat Cowboy – Learning To Rig a Character for Animation
- 9. Rat Cowboy – Animate a Full Sequence
- 10. Rat Cowboy – Rendering, Compositing, and Editing
-
2. Module 2
- 1. Modeling the Character's Base Mesh
- 2. Sculpting the Character's Base Mesh
- 3. Polygonal Modeling of the Character's Accessories
- 4. Re-topology of the High Resolution Sculpted Character's Mesh
- 5. Unwrapping the Low Resolution Mesh
-
6. Rigging the Low Resolution Mesh
- Introduction
- Building the character's Armature from scratch
- Perfecting the Armature to also function as a rig for the Armor
- Building the character's Armature through the Human Meta-Rig
- Building the animation controls and the Inverse Kinematic
- Generating the character's Armature by using the Rigify add-on
- 7. Skinning the Low Resolution Mesh
- 8. Finalizing the Model
- 9. Animating the Character
-
10. Creating the Textures
- Introduction
- Making a tileable scales image in Blender Internal
- Preparing the model to use the UDIM UV tiles
- Baking the tileable scales texture into the UV tiles
- Painting to fix the seams and to modify the baked scales image maps
- Painting the color maps in Blender Internal
- Painting the color maps in Cycles
- 11. Refining the Textures
- 12. Creating the Materials in Cycles
- 13. Creating the Materials in Blender Internal
- 14. Lighting, Rendering, and a Little Bit of Compositing
-
3. Module 3
- 1. Overview of Materials in Cycles
- 2. Managing Cycles Materials
-
3. Creating Natural Materials in Cycles
- Introduction
- Creating a rock material using image maps
- Creating a rock material using procedural textures
- Creating a sand material using procedural textures
- Creating a simple ground material using procedural textures
- Creating a snow material using procedural textures
- Creating an ice material using procedural textures
-
4. Creating Man-made Materials in Cycles
- Introduction
- Creating a generic plastic material
- Creating a Bakelite material
- Creating an expanded polystyrene material
- Creating a clear (glassy) polystyrene material
- Creating a rubber material
- Creating an antique bronze material with procedurals
- Creating a multipurpose metal node group
- Creating a rusty metal material with procedurals
- Creating a wood material with procedurals
- 5. Creating Complex Natural Materials in Cycles
- 6. Creating More Complex Man-made Materials
-
7. Subsurface Scattering in Cycles
- Introduction
- Using the Subsurface Scattering shader node
- Simulating Subsurface Scattering in Cycles using the Translucent shader
- Simulating Subsurface Scattering in Cycles using the Vertex Color tool
- Simulating Subsurface Scattering in Cycles using the Ray Length output in the Light Path node
- Creating a fake Subsurface Scattering node group
-
8. Creating Organic Materials
- Introduction
- Creating an organic-looking shader with procedurals
- Creating a wasp-like chitin material with procedural textures
- Creating a beetle-like chitin material with procedural textures
- Creating tree shaders – the bark
- Creating tree shaders – the leaves
- Creating a layered human skin material in Cycles
- Creating fur and hair
- Creating a gray alien skin material with procedurals
- 9. Special Materials
- Bibliography
- Index
Product information
- Title: Blender 3D: Designing Objects
- Author(s):
- Release date: November 2016
- Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
- ISBN: 9781787127197
You might also like
book
Beginning Blender: Open Source 3D Modeling, Animation, and Game Design
A new world of creative possibilities is opened by Blender, the most popular and powerful open …
book
Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook
If you’re already au fait with Blender, this book gives extra power to your artist’s elbow …
book
Blender Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook - Third Edition
Over 40 practical recipes to create stunning materials and textures using the Cycles rendering engine with …
book
Blender for Visual Effects
Bringing concrete examples from industry to light, this book explains how to use Blender to create …