Blender Master Class: A Hands-On Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering

616 Pages·2013·21.76 MB·English

by  Ben Simonds

Blender Master Class: a hands-on
guide to modeling, sculpting,
materials, and rendering
Ben Simonds
Published by No Starch Press
This book is dedicated to my parents, James and Katrina.
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without patient help from Bill Pollock,
Alison Law, and everyone else at No Starch Press who helped put it together.
Thanks also to the minds behind CGTextures (http://cgtextures.com/), who have
put together a fantastic resource for artists and who kindly gave permission for
the textures used in the projects in this book to be included on the DVD.
Most of all, thanks to Ton Roosendaal and all those who have contributed to
Blender. It’s my favorite piece of software and one around which my livelihood
is largely built. I’m very grateful for it. Thanks to Thomas Dinges, who is not
only an active developer of Blender but also took the time to do the technical
review of this book. Thanks to the Blender community, to the members of the
Blender Artists Community (http://www.blenderartists.org/), and to everyone
who contributes to the Blender wiki and other resources like it. It’s great to be a
member of such a creative, open, and friendly bunch.
About the Author
Ben Simonds is a 3D artist and co-director of Gecko Animation Ltd., an
animation and post-production company based in London, England
(http://geckoanimation.com/). He first started messing around with Blender back
in 2005, when he had no idea it would eventually become a major part of his day
job. Since then he’s authored a wide variety of tutorials and articles for his own
website (http://bensimonds.com/) and other Blender community websites,
including Blender Cookie and BlenderNation.
At Gecko Animation, he produces visual effects, models, animation, and
graphics for TV and advertising. His work has appeared on major UK TV
channels like the BBC, Channel 4, and Dave. Gecko Animation’s in-house short
animation Assembly: Life in Macrospace won the 2011 Suzanne Award for Best
Designed Short Film at the Blender Conference in Amsterdam.
About the Technical Reviewer
Thomas Dinges was born in 1991. He started using Blender and became
interested in 3D graphics at the age of 16, after seeing the world’s first open
movie, Elephants Dream. In 2009, he started working on Blender as a developer,
helping create the new interface for the Blender 2.5x project. He also has
organized the German Blender conference, BlenderDay, since 2009. His website
is http://www.dingto.org/.
Introduction
Welcome! This book is designed to teach you how to create models and
environments in 3D, using two pieces of software: Blender, for 3D design and
animation, and GIMP, for 2D image editing. In each chapter I take you through a
part of the process of creating three complete 3D scenes. You’ll learn how to
block out and create models, sculpt and detail them, texture and create materials,
use lighting, and render finished images. In the course of the book, I discuss the
wide array of tools that Blender and GIMP offer and how to use them in real
projects.
My goal is to teach you how to approach and finish your own projects in
Blender, using three of my own projects to provide the narrative and examples of
the tasks required. By the end of this book, you should be able to create your
own projects from scratch using the principles demonstrated in the three
example projects.
Topics Covered
Here’s a brief summary of each chapter in the book.
Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 offer an introduction to Blender and GIMP. You learn
what they are, where you can get them, and what you can do with them. I also
introduce you to their user interfaces and the basics of working with them.
Chapter 1 focuses on Blender. We look at adding and manipulating objects,
saving and loading, and best practices when working on a project. In Chapter 2
we examine creating images in GIMP using its various brushes and filters, as
well as how to work with layers and selections.
Chapter 3 covers gathering reference material, creating concept art and using
these materials in Blender to make it easier to bring your ideas to life in 3D. I
discuss using orthographic references, creating reference sheets, and importing
reference images into Blender’s 3D Viewport to use while modeling.
In Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 we move on to blocking in the most important
aspects of a scene with simple geometry and then fleshing out these basic forms
with more detailed models. We look in-depth at Blender’s 3D modeling tools
and how to create models with simple, efficient geometry.
Chapter 6 covers Blender’s sculpting tools and how to combine them with
Blender’s Multiresolution modifier to produce a model that can be sculpted like
clay—perfect for creating detailed, organic models.
Chapter 7 looks at how to modify the high-resolution, sculpted geometry from
Chapter 6 to create simpler geometry. We look at a few of the different methods
Blender offers for retopology and how they can be applied to turn our sculpted
meshes into final models.
Chapter 8 looks at Blender’s UV unwrapping tools that allow you to map 2D
images onto the surface of your models. This lets you paint on them and give
them colors and textures.
Chapter 9 covers creating strand particle systems with Blender’s particle tools.
These can be used to generate hair and fur, and Blender’s particle mode brushes
allow you to comb and cut that hair or fur into many shapes and styles. We look
at the various settings for particle systems and how to use Blender’s child
particles to generate vast numbers of particles from relatively few parents in
order to create complex, thick hair and fur with minimum input.
Chapter 10 looks at texture baking, the process of automatically generating
textures based on the geometry of a mesh, while Chapter 11 covers texture
painting, which combines the baked textures from Chapter 10 with hand-painted
details and photographs using Blender’s texture painting tools and GIMP.
Chapter 12 and Chapter 13 cover Blender’s materials and lighting options. We
look at the Blender Internal renderer and the Cycles render engine, and how each
impacts the way we set up our lights and materials. In Chapter 12 we learn how
to use the textures created in Chapter 10 and Chapter 11 to create materials that
give realistic results when rendered. Chapter 13 covers creating lights and how
to set them up for both the Blender Internal and Cycles engines to get attractive
lighting and shadows that render quickly.
In Chapter 14 we bring together all of the components created in previous
chapters, including models, lights, materials, and textures, to render our final
images. We discuss the most important render settings for the Blender Internal
and Cycles engines, along with how to get the best results quickly. We also
examine Blender’s node-based compositor and how to use it to further post-
process your final renders. Finally, we use GIMP for some extra touch-ups and
for painting backgrounds for our images.
In Chapter 15 we take a final look at the projects covered, and think about what
could be done to take things further. I cover adding a few embellishments to the
projects and look at them from some different perspectives, before examining
ways to take our still images and make them move with Blender’s rigging and
animation tools.
What Isn’t Covered
Blender is an extremely powerful 3D design and animation package. It has tools
for modeling, texturing, creating materials, and particle systems, as well as tools
for rigging and animation, compositing, and scripting; a full-featured game
engine; a non-linear video editor; and some advanced fluid, cloth, and rigid
body-simulation tools. This book attempts to deal only with the aspects of
Blender that are needed to create, texture, and render models as still images. It
doesn’t cover Blender’s rigging and animation tools, simulation tools, or the
game engine. There are a wealth of other resources out there on such topics. If
you’re interested in finding them, try http://www.blender.org/education-help/.
Requirements
To make the most of this book, you will need a reasonably current computer,
running a recent version of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. In
particular, when it comes to the sculpting portions of the book, some extra RAM
(8GB is good) and a reasonably fast graphics card will prove useful. A pressure
sensitive pen tablet (for example a Wacom Bamboo or Intuos) will be really
helpful when you reach the texturing and sculpting sections of the book, but it
isn’t an absolute necessity.
The Projects
In order to provide a common thread as we progress through this book, I’ve
chosen to center the discussion on three projects. Each was chosen to provide
different challenges and thus provide you with broad, practical knowledge of the
tools and options in Blender and GIMP.
The Bat Creature
The Bat Creature project focuses on organic modeling to create a humanoid, if
monstrous, creature (Figure 1). For this project we first create a simple base
mesh and then sculpt the more complex, organic forms of the body with
Blender’s sculpt tools. We complement this by creating fur with Blender’s
particle systems. We move on to unwrapping and texturing our creature and then
create realistic materials for the skin and fur, which feature subsurface scattering
and realistic hair. We render this project with the Blender Internal engine in
order to use its highly customizable materials and fast, efficient rendering of hair
and fur. Finally we create some dramatic lighting in Chapter 13, where you learn
how to get the best results from Blender’s lights and how to achieve realistic
shadows when working with fur.
The Spider Bot
In contrast to the organic forms of the Bat Creature project, the Spider Bot
project will show you how to create a mechanical-looking, hard-surface model
of a robotic spider (Figure 2). This task requires a different approach at each
stage of the project when compared with the Bat Creature. We begin by blocking
in basic forms with simple geometry, but we use duplication to create the
repeated parts of the model, such as the legs. When sculpting we use Blender’s
hard-surface brushes to arrive at a smoother, less organic final result. Then we
use Blender’s retopology tools to refine the model into something smooth and
sleek. Finally, we render this project with the Cycles render engine because it
offers realistic rendering of shiny materials and complex lighting.