Learning Blender

by Villar, Oliver

• ISBN13: 9780136411758
• ISBN10: 0136411754
• Edition: 3rd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2020-10-15
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional

Summary

Master the Newest Blender Techniques for Creating Amazing 3D Characters: From Design and Modeling to Video Compositing

Now fully updated for Blender 2.83 LTS (Long-Term Support) and beyond, Learning Blender, Third Edition, walks you through every step of creating an outstanding 3D animated character with Blender, and then compositing it in a real video using a professional workflow. This edition covers the extensive interface changes of the software, as well as many improvements and some almost fully rewritten chapters to showcase more modern workflows.

Still the only Blender tutorial to take you from preproduction to final result, this guide is perfect for both novices and those moving from other software to Blender (open source and free software). Author Oliver Villar provides full-color, hands-on chapters that cover every aspect of character creation: design, modeling, unwrapping, texturing, shading, rigging, animation, and rendering. He also walks you through integrating your animated character into a real-world video, using professional camera tracking, lighting, and compositing techniques.

The rich companion website ( blendtuts.com/learning-blender-files) will help you quickly master even the most complex techniques with bonus contents like video tutorials. By the time you're done, you'll be ready to create outstanding characters for all media -- and you'll have up-to-date skills for any 3D project, whether it involves characters or not.

• Learn Blender's updated user interface and navigation
• Create your first scene with Blender and the Blender Render and Cycles render engines
• Organize an efficient, step-by-step pipeline to streamline workflow in any project
• Master modeling, unwrapping, and texturing
• Bring your character to life with materials and shading in both Cycles and EEVEE (the new real-time render engine included in Blender)
• Create your character's skeleton and make it walk
• Use Camera Tracking to mix 3D objects into a real-world video
• Transform a raw rendered scene into the final result using Blender's compositing nodes

Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

Author Biography

Oliver Villar is a Blender Foundation Certified Trainer. He has has studied 3D since 2004 and used diverse commercial 3D software before stumbling onto Blender in 2008. Since then, he has used Blender professionally as a freelance 3D designer and tutor. In 2010, he founded blendtuts.com to offer high-quality Blender training videos to the community. He authored this book's first and second editions and the video, Introduction to Blender LiveLessons (Addison-Wesley, 2015). Villar is now co-directing Luke's Escape, a 3D animated short film made with Blender. He is also teaching Blender at online schools focused on teaching for the Spanish community and teaches 3D for online schools and the University of Murcia in Spain.

Table of Contents

Part I The Basics of Blender

1. What You Need to Know About Blender

2. Blender Basics: The User Interface

3. Your First Scene in Blender

Part II Beginning a Project

4. Project Overview

5. Character Design

Part III Modeling in Blender

6. Blender Modeling Tools

7. Character Modeling

Part IV Unwrapping, Painting, and Shading

8. Unwrapping and UVs in Blender

9. Painting Textures

10. Materials and Shaders

Part V Bringing Your Character to Life

11. Character Rigging

12. Animating Your Character

Part VI Getting the Final Result

13. Camera Tracking in Blender

14. Lighting, Compositing, and Rendering

Part VII Keep Learning

15. Other Blender Features