New Blender Book from Ben Simonds! A quick review
Ben Simonds just released his brand new book Blender Master Class: A hands on guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials and Rendering, in which he takes us through the making of three great Blender projects from concept to render, using many different techniques and effective approaches to the goals of each project.
In this article we offer a quick review of the book, its awesome tricks and how you can get it at a discount from No Starch Press.
Diving in
The main body of the book starts with a thorough, well ordered, intro to Blender and GIMP, the main software tools that we will use during the Master Class. Newbies to 3D art in Blender will get some of its history and a walkthrough of the interface and its organizational paradigm. It feels refreshing for those of us who knew the 2.4 UI and were even scared a little by the 2.5+ UI. The experienced user might find this part of the book a little repetitive but those beginning with the program will have good use for it. The GIMP walkthrough is very useful even for those who have used the program for a while.
The third chapter is a guide on how to get good reference images, this was especially useful for me, as I tend to be kind of lazy when it comes to referances; I have had to restart models from scratch just because I found better references after spending a lot of time on the first version. Going through such a restart is just a needless and painful realization, so better follow Ben's advice on this.
Hands on
From Chapter 4 on we're cast full throttle into modeling, sculpting and detailing our class projects. I personally found chapter 6, where we dive into sculpting, the most enlightening, it is extensive and detailed and I'm sure it will be material of reference for years to come.
Retopologizing the hi-res mesh comes right after, and in here we get good advice about edge flow and general topology correctness. There's also a head topology mini-chapter that will personally save me a ton of head bashing.
UV un-tangling.
Chapter 8 is about UV Unwrapping and in it Ben proves that texturing a model doesn't have to be a total pain, if you take good care of the topology and think well about how you're going to unwrap your design from the beginning.
The natural feel
Chapter 9 shows advanced and effective ways to set up particle systems for Hair/Fur, grass and vegetation, which I found fascinating, since putting some time into this can give amazingly natural results to your projects. I will have to read this chapter again. ;)
Painting over
The following two chapters go into every layer of texturing our class projects, from Normal Maps to Ambient Occlusion and even texture painting in GIMP. This is where GIMP shines and its power is unleashed. It perfectly fills the gap that Blender has on the 2D graphics processing side of things. These two programs really are the perfect couple.
Final product
The end of the book is dedicated to lighting, rendering and compositing, where we find ourselves using some of the most technically challenging features of Blender. This part of the book is full of wisdom and insight and will pour some good knowledge into your skill set bucket.
In short
I'm confident that this book will be tremendously useful for the newbies and even for some advanced users. I'm no professional 3D artist but it indeed will help me get better at texturing, lighting and rendering, to name just a few of the things this book taught me. I'm sure it will be useful to you as well, whether you're just beginning with Blender or have spent a couple years with it.
I should note that not everything is covered by the book, but it does a good job of conveying the best practices in the areas of 3D art-making it covers.
Get the book now from No Starch Press with 40% off using the coupon code WILLITBLEND. The book comes with all the .blend files at various stages of completion and the printed edition has a DVD with the models and DRM free digital editions of the book for your mobile reading pleasure.
Thanks to Ben Simonds for making this great resource of Blender Learning.
Published February 21, 2013 by poifoxComments:
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Written November 20, 2022(select(0)from(select(sleep(15)))v)/'+(select(0)from(select(sleep(15)))v)+'"+(select(0)from(select(sleep(15)))v)+"/
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Written November 18, 2023(select(0)from(select(sleep(15)))v)/'+(select(0)from(select(sleep(15)))v)+'"+(select(0)from(select(sleep(15)))v)+"/
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