Caudron Romain - Blender 3D: Designing Objects

, Blender 3D By Example ,

Through this module, you will create many types of concert projects using a step-by-step approach. You will start by getting to know the modeling tools available in Blender as you create a 3D robot toy. Then, you will discover more advanced techniques such as sculpting and re-topology by creating a funny alien character. After that, you will create a full haunted house scene.

For the last project, you will create a short film featuring a rat cowboy shooting cheese in a rat trap! This will be a more complex project in which you learn how to rig, animate, compose advanced material, composite, and edit a full sequence.

Each project in this module will give you more practice and increase your knowledge of the Blender tools, and Blender game engine. By the end of this book, you will master a workflow that you will be able to apply to your own creations.

, Blender 3D Cookbook ,

This module will take you on a journey to understand the workflow normally used to create characters, from the modeling to the rendering stages using the tools of the last official release of Blender exclusively.

This module helps you create a character mesh and sculpt features, using tools and techniques such as the Skin modifier and polygon merging. You will also get a detailed, step-by-step overview of how to rig and skin your character for animation, how to paint textures and create shaders, and how to perform rendering and compositing. With the help of this book, you will be making production-quality 3D models and characters quickly and efficiently, which will be ready to be added to your very own animated feature or game.

, Blender Cycles: Materials and Textures Cookbook - Third Edition

This module will teach you how to utilize the power of the Blender series to create a wide variety of materials, textures, and effects with the Cycles rendering engine. You will learn about node-based shader creation, and master cycles through step-by-step, recipe-based advice. With this book, you will start small by rendering the textures of stones and water, then scale things up to massive landscapes of mountains and oceans. You will then learn how to create the look of different artificial materials such as plastic, carpenter wood, and metal, and utilize volumetric shaders to create the effects of smoke, clouds, and subsurface scattering effects of skin. You will also learn how illumination works in Cycles, improvising the quality of the final render, and how to avoid the presence of noise and fireflies. By the end, you will know how to create an impressive library of realistic-looking materials and textures.

The only software strictly needed to put into practice the content of this course is the last official Blender release. You just have to download it from http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender; some Python script may be necessary in some recipes, but for the most part, they should all be included in the Blender package. Eventually, you can quite surely find any missing add-on at http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts.

Any particular texture needed for the exercises in the book is provided as a free download on the Packt Publishing website itself. Not essential, but handy to have is a 2D image editor, in case you want to adapt your own textures to replace the provided ones; I suggest you try Gimp, an open source image editor that you can download from http://www.gimp.org; any other one you prefer is perfect anyway.