Blender 3D: Designing Objects

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.

Table of Contents

Module 1
Chapter 1: Straight into Blender!
Chapter 2: Robot Toy – Modeling of an Object
Chapter 3: Alien Character – Base Mesh Creation and Sculpting
Chapter 4: Alien Character – Creating a Proper Topology and Transferring the Sculpt Details
Chapter 5: Haunted House – Modeling of the Scene
Chapter 6: Haunted House – Putting Colors on It
Chapter 7: Haunted House – Adding Materials and Lights in Cycles
Chapter 8: Rat Cowboy – Learning To Rig a Character for Animation
Chapter 9: Rat Cowboy – Animate a Full Sequence
Chapter 10: Rat Cowboy – Rendering, Compositing, and Editing

Module 2
Chapter 1: Modeling the Character’s Base Mesh
Chapter 2: Sculpting the Character’s Base Mesh
Chapter 3: Polygonal Modeling of the Character’s Accessories
Chapter 4: Re-topology of the High Resolution Sculpted Character’s Mesh
Chapter 5: Unwrapping the Low Resolution Mesh
Chapter 6: Rigging the Low Resolution Mesh
Chapter 7: Skinning the Low Resolution Mesh
Chapter 8: Finalizing the Model
Chapter 9: Animating the Character
Chapter 10: Creating the Textures
Chapter 11: Refining the Textures
Chapter 12: Creating the Materials in Cycles
Chapter 13: Creating the Materials in Blender Internal
Chapter 14: Lighting, Rendering, and a Little Bit of Compositing

Module 3
Chapter 1: Overview of Materials in Cycles
Chapter 2: Managing Cycles Materials
Chapter 3: Creating Natural Materials in Cycles
Chapter 4: Creating Man-made Materials in Cycles
Chapter 5: Creating Complex Natural Materials in Cycles
Chapter 6: Creating More Complex Man-made Materials
Chapter 7: Subsurface Scattering in Cycles
Chapter 8: Creating Organic Materials
Chapter 9: Special Materials