What this book covers

Chapter 1, Straight into Blender!, discovers the fundamentals of 3D creation and covers how to navigate in the Blender user interface.

Chapter 2, Robot Toy – Modeling of an Object, teaches the basic polygonal modeling tools of Blender. In this chapter, you will model a complete Robot Toy starting from a 2D concept.

Chapter 3, Alien Character – Base Mesh Creation and Sculpting, helps you to understand the sculpting tools of Blender while sculpting an alien character. In order to have the best result, this chapter provides an introduction to anatomy as well.

Chapter 4, Alien Character – Creating a Proper Topology and Transferring the Sculpt Details, covers how to create a clean version of the sculpted model that can be used for animation or game. Moreover, this chapter explains how to unwrap UVs so that a normal and ambient occlusion map can be baked.

Chapter 5, Haunted House – Modeling of the Scene, covers more advanced modeling tools such as curves, in order to model a full haunted house scene.

Chapter 6, Haunted House – Putting Colors on It, improves the haunted house scene using the texturing tools of Blender. Some techniques to produce hand painted tiled textures are explained as well.

Chapter 7, Haunted House – Adding Materials and Lights in Cycles, explains how lights work in order to light the scene. This chapter also provides a basic comprehension of the Cycles render engine and its node-based material creation process.

Chapter 8, Rat Cowboy – Learning to Rig a Character for Animation, covers the creation of a full bipedal rig by hand using bones, constraints, shape keys, and custom shapes.

Chapter 9, Rat Cowboy – Animate a Full Sequence, covers the preproduction stage of animation. Then after explaining the principles of animation, this chapter dives into the animation of a full sequence using the different tools that Blender has to offer.

Chapter 10, Rat Cowboy – Rendering, Compositing, and Editing, covers more advanced techniques to create a fur or a skin material. Then it explains how to polish and edit the sequence using the nodal composting and the editing tools of Blender.