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(23 reviews)
Author: Visit Amazon's Ben Simonds Page
ISBN : 1593274777
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Format: PDF
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Amazon.com Review
From the Author: 5 Tips for Sculpting in Blender
1. Work rough to smooth. Don't start adding details to your sculpts until you're happy with the overall shapes. Otherwise, you'll end up having to re-do details later if you have to correct mistakes, or worse, you'll end up leaving mistakes in because you don't want to disrupt those nice details you spent all that time on. Enjoy the freedom you have in the early stages of sculpting, and be confident in making big brushstrokes when laying down the broad shapes of your sculpts. You can worry about the details later.
2. Add and subtract. A common mistake for those new to sculpting is to build up forms and correct mistakes by adding more and more volume to their sculpts. This can sometimes get out of control, disrupting the overall proportions and resulting in big, inflated looking characters. Instead, refine your model using the subtractive and additive modes of each sculpt brush, and watch your model's silhouette to make sure that the overall shape stays under control.
3. Break symmetry. When sculpting characters, it can be tempting to rely on Blender's symmetry tools to sculpt both sides of your character at once. This is great when you're just beginning a sculpt, but real characters have varying degrees of asymmetry, and there can be big differences between the two sides of a character. Decide for yourself when it's the right time to turn off symmetry for your specific sculpt, but definitely do it before you get down to the really fine details.
4. Use Blender's hiding tools to sculpt difficult to reach areas. Blender has some nice tools for hiding geometry when sculpting, which can be found in the 3D Viewport header in Sculpt mode. You can hide based on masking, or draw a bounding box to hide polygons. You can also use the shortcut Alt-B to restrict Blender's Viewport to only draw objects within a bounding box, which works in any model.
5. Check your Viewport camera settings. Bring up the Properties region of the 3D Viewport (hotkey N) and adjust the Lens setting in the View panel. This adjusts the perspective of your view and makes a big difference to how the proportions of your sculpt will appear. When looking close up at a face, noses can look big and bulbous and the sides of heads look to be far in the distance with too small a lens value. Try to match the perspective you see in your reference. If you aren't working from reference, a value of around 100mm works well for sculpting faces.
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 inhouse short animation Assembly: Life in Macrospace won the 2011 Suzanne Award for Best Designed Short Film at the Blender Conference in Amsterdam.
Books with free ebook downloads available Blender Master Class: A Hands-On Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering Paperback Free Download
- Paperback: 288 pages
- Publisher: No Starch Press; Pap/Dvdr edition (February 28, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1593274777
- ISBN-13: 978-1593274771
- Product Dimensions: 0.6 x 8 x 10 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Blender Master Class: A Hands-On Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering Free Download
Blender is a beast. At least to a guy like me that is usual in code and not in user interface tools. Sure I use Xcode, Eclipse, and Visual Studio but they just give me a place to code. I have used Photoshop, GIMP, and Expression Studio which make you depend on the tools available but Blender is in a class of its own.
I have downloaded it in the past around the time Big Buck Bunny was first released. I spent a few weeks playing with it, but got nowhere. This book convinced me to take another crack at it and I am really glad I did.
The book starts off with an introduction to Blender and a short introduction to GIMP. GIMP is another powerful open source tool the author uses for 2D image editing throughout the book. For a great book on GIMP check out The Book of GIMP: A Complete Guide to Nearly Everything.
I have listed all the chapters below to give you an idea of all the high level topics covered. Each chapter is packed with tons of information.
1. Introduction to Blender
2. Introduction to GIMP
3. Preparation
4. Blocking In
5. Modeling the Details
6. Sculpting
7. Retopology
8. UV Unwrapping
9. Hair and Particle Systems
10. Texture Baking
11. Texture Painting
12. Materials
13. Lighting
14. Rendering and Compositing
15. Going Further
I had Blender open almost the entire time I read the book. It took a little longer to get through because I kept getting sidetracked trying different things, and wanted to be in front of a computer with Blender on it, but I think it was worth it.
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