Blender 3D: Designing Objects by Enrico Valenza

Key FeaturesPacked with illustrations and a lot of tips and tricks to make your scenes come to lifeDesign a complete workflow with Blender to create stunning 3D scenes and films step by stepGain an understanding of how to create and assign materials automatically, working in both the Blender Internal engine as well as in CyclesBook DescriptionBlender 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 NicqBlender 3D Cookbook By Enrico ValenzaBlender Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook - Third Edition By Enrico ValenzaWhat you will learnUnderstand the basics of 3D and how to navigate your way around the Blender interfaceDiscover the power of the texture paint tool in order to add color to a haunted houseGet to know the Cycles render engine by creating different materials for the house and the environmentFind the best possible flow for your edge-loops to enhance the character features and to get the best possible range of deformationMix both the Blender Internal and Cycles rendering engines in order to render materials as quickly as possibleSet up light sources and world global illuminationBuild material interfaces for general use in complex materials by grouping the shaders inside groupsParent and rename the nodes to better organize the Node Editor windowAbout the AuthorRomain Caudron is a French 2D/3D artist. He is a cofounder and CG artist of Main Digitales, a new video game studio in Montpellier in the south of France, and he specializes in virtual reality. Also, he is an assistant to Patrice Stellest, the Swiss contemporary artist.Romain has had a mostly self-taught career, but he received a masters degree in cinema and game design from Paul Valery University, Montpellier III, France. Then, he studied 3D animation using CGTrainer. His interest in hacker culture and open source software led him to start working with Blender in 2012.Before this book, in 2014, he was a reviewer on Blender Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook by Enrico Valenza.Pierre-Armand Nicq started learning how to generate 3D images with Blender 2.4x at a young age. He is really passionate about all types of multimedia creation and uses Blender for projects such as 3D images/animations and games. He codes in different programming languages, such as C/C++, C#, AS3, JavaScript, and PHP, to create games and other kinds of programs. Pierre-Armand loves to share his knowledge. This is why he founded a French YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/ToutApprendre). It has more than 9,500 subscribers and 200 tutorials about 3D and programming. Currently, he is in his fifth and last year of school at IIM (Paris/La Defense). During his free time, he loves to play jazz music, participate in GameJams, and perform card tricks.Enrico Valenza, also known as EnV on the Web, is an Italian freelance illustrator, mainly collaborating with publishers such as Mondadori Ragazzi and Giunti as a cover artist for sci-fi and fantasy books.He graduated from Liceo Artistico Statale in Verona (Italy) and was later a student of illustrator and painter Giorgio Scarato.When he started to work, computers werent that much in use among normal people, and he spent the first 15 years of his career doing illustration with traditional media, usually on cardboard; he specialized in the use of the air-graph, a technique particularly esteemed for advertisement work.When the movie Jurassic Park came to theaters, he decided to buy a computer and try this computer graphic everyone was talking about. When it comes to the many aspects of CG, he has been totally self-taught; it has been his encounter with the open source philosophy that actually opened a brand new world of possibilities, Blender in particular.In 2005, he won the Suzanne Award for Best Animation, Original Idea and Story with the animation New Penguoen 2.38.In 2006, he joined the Orange Team in Amsterdam for the 2 last weeks of production to help in finalizing the shots of the first open source cg animated short movie produced by the Blender Foundation, Elephants Dream.From 2007 to 2008, he has been a lead artist in the Peach Project team for the production of Big Buck Bunny, the second Blender Foundations open movie.From 2010 to 2011, he has been an art director at CINECA (Bologna, Italy) for the Museo della Citta di Bologna project, which is the production of a stereoscopic CG-animated documentary made in Blender and which explains the history of the city of Bologna.Also, being a Blender Certified Trainer, he often collaborates as a cg artist with production studios that have decided to switch their pipeline to open source.Enrico uses Blender almost on a daily basis for his illustration jobs, rarely to have the illustration rendered straight by the 3D package and more often as a starting point for painting over with other open source applications.He has conducted several presentations and workshops about Blender and its use in productions.Table of ContentsStraight into Blender!Robot Toy – Modeling of an ObjectAlien Character – Base Mesh Creation and SculptingAlien Character – Creating a Proper Topology and Transferring the Sculpt DetailsHaunted House – Modeling of the SceneHaunted House – Putting Colors on ItHaunted House – Adding Materials and Lights in CyclesRat Cowboy – Learning To Rig a Character for AnimationRat Cowboy – Animate a Full SequenceRat Cowboy – Rendering, Compositing, and EditingModeling the Characters Base MeshSculpting the Characters Base MeshPolygonal Modeling of the Characters AccessoriesRe-topology of the High Resolution Sculpted Characters MeshUnwrapping the Low Resolution MeshRigging the Low Resolution MeshSkinning the Low Resolution MeshFinalizing the ModelAnimating the CharacterCreating the TexturesRefining the TexturesCreating the Materials in CyclesCreating the Materials in Blender InternalLighting, Rendering, and a Little Bit of CompositingOverview of Materials in CyclesManaging Cycles MaterialsCreating Natural Materials in CyclesCreating Man-made Materials in CyclesCreating Complex Natural Materials in CyclesCreating More Complex Man-made MaterialsSubsurface Scattering in CyclesCreating Organic MaterialsSpecial MaterialsBibliography