Blender All-in-One For Dummies
1st Edition
Published on 20. March 2024
768 pages
978-1-394-20405-2 (ISBN)
Description
Create excellent 3D animations with free, open-source software
When you're looking for help with creating animation with Blender, look no further than the top-selling Blender book on the market. This edition of Blender For Dummies covers every step in the animation process, from basic design all the way to finished product. This book walks you through each project phase, including creating models, adding lighting and environment, animating objects, and building a final shareable file. Written by long-time Blender evangelist Jason van Gumster, this deep reference teaches you the full animation process from idea to final vision. With this fun and easy guide, you're on your way toward making your animation dreams a reality.
* Set up Blender and navigate the interface
* Learn how to build models in virtual space
* Texture, light, and animate your figures--then render your final product
* Get help and inspiration from the Blender community
If you're new to Blender or an experienced user in need of a reference, Blender For Dummies is the easy-to-use guide for you.
When you're looking for help with creating animation with Blender, look no further than the top-selling Blender book on the market. This edition of Blender For Dummies covers every step in the animation process, from basic design all the way to finished product. This book walks you through each project phase, including creating models, adding lighting and environment, animating objects, and building a final shareable file. Written by long-time Blender evangelist Jason van Gumster, this deep reference teaches you the full animation process from idea to final vision. With this fun and easy guide, you're on your way toward making your animation dreams a reality.
* Set up Blender and navigate the interface
* Learn how to build models in virtual space
* Texture, light, and animate your figures--then render your final product
* Get help and inspiration from the Blender community
If you're new to Blender or an experienced user in need of a reference, Blender For Dummies is the easy-to-use guide for you.
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Jason van Gumster
Blender All-in-One For Dummies
Book
05/2024
1st Edition
Wiley
€47.50
Available immediately
Person
Jason van Gumster is an expert Blender consultant to top studios and toolmakers. Jason and his family live the life of digital nomads while he builds custom tools and leads workshops on Blender all over the world. He's author of all editions of Blender For Dummies, as well as GIMP Bible.
Content
- Intro
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Table of Contents
- Introduction
- About This Book
- Foolish Assumptions
- Icons Used in This Book
- Beyond the Book
- Where to Go from Here
- Book 1 Wrapping Your Brain Around Blender
- Chapter 1 Discovering Blender
- Getting to Know Blender
- Discovering Blender's origins and the strength of the Blender community
- Understanding Blender release versions
- Making open movies and games
- Joining the community
- Getting to Know the Interface
- Working with an interface that stays out of your way
- Understanding workspaces
- Blender workflows
- Resizing areas
- Splitting and removing areas
- Duplicating an area to a new window
- Customizing headers
- Maximizing an area
- The menu that is a pie
- Chapter 2 Understanding How Blender Thinks
- Menus in Blender
- Looking at Editor Types
- General editors
- Animation editors
- Scripting editors
- Data editors
- Understanding the Properties Editor
- Navigating in Three Dimensions
- Orbiting, panning, and zooming the 3D Viewport
- Changing views
- The View menu
- Behold the power of the numeric keypad!
- Ways to see your 3D scene
- Selecting objects
- Using Blender's selection tools
- Why right-click select?
- Taking advantage of the 3D cursor
- Extra Features in the 3D Viewport
- Quad View
- Regions
- The Sidebar
- The Toolbar
- Tool Settings
- The Last Operator panel
- Collaborating (with others and yourself) with annotations
- Don't know how to do something? Hooray for fully integrated search!
- Customizing Blender to Fit You
- Using preset workspaces
- General
- 2D Animation
- Sculpting
- VFX
- Video Editing
- Blender workflows
- Creating a new workspace
- Customizing your new workspace
- Setting new defaults
- Setting user preferences
- Using custom event maps
- Speeding up your workflow with Quick Favorites
- Chapter 3 Getting Your Hands Dirty Working in Blender
- Grabbing, Scaling, and Rotating
- Differentiating Between Coordinate Systems
- Transforming an Object by Using Tools
- Activating transform tools
- Using transform gizmos
- Creating Custom Transform Orientations
- Saving Time by Using Hotkeys
- Transforming with hotkeys
- Hotkeys and coordinate systems
- Numerical input
- Other Ways to Transform Objects
- The Sidebar
- Object Properties
- Chapter 4 Working in Edit Mode and Object Mode
- Making Changes by Using Edit Mode
- Switching between Object mode and Edit mode
- Selecting vertices, edges, and faces
- Understanding ngons and their limitations
- Working with linked vertices
- Still Blender's No. 1 modeling tool: Extrude
- Modeling organically with Proportional Editing
- Understanding Datablocks: Fundamental Elements in a Blender File
- Adding to a Scene
- Adding objects
- Meet Suzanne, the Blender monkey
- Joining and separating objects
- Understanding the difference between joins and booleans
- Creating duplicates and links
- Linking data between objects
- Unlinking datablocks
- Discovering parents, children, and collections
- Establishing parent-child relationships between objects
- Creating collections
- Using collections
- Selecting with parents and collections
- Saving, opening, and appending
- Saving after the first time
- Opening a file
- Appending from an external file
- Book 2 Creating Detailed 3D Scenes
- Chapter 1 Creating Anything You Can Imagine with Meshes
- Pushing Vertices
- Getting familiar with Edit mode tools
- Adding geometry by insetting
- Using the Inset Faces tool
- Advanced insetting with hotkeys
- Cleaning up ugly geometry by merging
- Cutting edges with the Knife
- Using the Knife tool
- Bisecting
- Rounding your corners by beveling
- Using the Bevel tool
- Taking the hotkey-and-tweak approach to beveling
- Spiraling new geometry into existence with the Spin tool
- Working with Loops and Rings
- Understanding edge loops and face loops
- Selecting edge rings
- Creating new loops
- The importance of good topology
- Chapter 2 Simplifying Your Life as a Modeler with Modifiers
- Accessing Blender's Modifiers
- Understanding Modifier Types
- Modify modifiers
- Generate modifiers
- Deform modifiers
- Physics modifiers
- Working with Commonly Used Modifiers
- Doing half the work (and still looking good!) with the Mirror modifier
- Smoothing things out with the Subdivision Surface modifier
- Using the power of Arrays
- Chapter 3 Sculpting in Virtual Space
- Adding Background Images in the 3D Viewport
- Mastering the types of image objects
- Changing image object properties
- Adjusting your image objects
- Setting Up Your Sculpting Workspace
- Understanding Matcaps: A Display Option for Sculpting
- Sculpting a Mesh Object
- Understanding sculpt tool types
- Additive tools
- Subtractive tools
- Move tools
- Simulation tools
- Helper and paint tools
- Mask and filter tools
- Understanding the difference between tools and brushes
- Tweaking brush properties
- Refining control of your tools
- Creating custom brushes
- Using Blender's texture system to tweak brushes
- Sculpting with the Multiresolution Modifier
- Freeform Sculpting with Dynamic Topology (Dyntopo)
- Sculpting with Voxel Remesh
- Understanding the Basics of Retopology
- Chapter 4 Using Blender's Non-Mesh Primitives
- Using Curves and Surfaces
- Understanding the different types of curves
- The anatomy of a Bézier curve
- Working with curves
- Drawing curves
- Changing 3D curves into 2D curves
- Extruding, beveling, and tapering curves
- Adjusting curve tilt
- Editing Bézier curves
- Editing NURBS curves and surfaces
- Understanding the strengths and limitations of Blender's surfaces
- Using Metaball Objects
- Meta-wha?
- What metaball objects are useful for
- Adding Text
- Adding and editing text
- Controlling text appearance
- Changing fonts
- Adjusting paragraph styles
- Working with text boxes
- Deforming text with a curve
- Converting to curves and meshes
- Chapter 5 Getting Procedural with Geometry Nodes
- Discovering the Differences between Destructive and Procedural Modeling
- Using the Geometry Nodes Workspace
- Meet the Node editor
- Spreadsheets? In a 3D Program? Yes.
- Understanding Nodes
- Working with Nodes
- Identifying the parts of a node
- Adding nodes to your network
- Keeping your nodes organized
- Organizing nodes with frames
- Building reusable blocks with groups
- Creating loops with the simulation zone
- Getting Familiar with Commonly Used Geometry Nodes
- Thinking Procedurally: Model Like a Rigger
- Book 3 Working with Colors and Materials
- Chapter 1 Changing That Boring Gray Default Material
- Understanding Materials and Render Engines
- Quick 'n' Dirty Coloring
- Setting diffuse colors
- Assigning multiple materials to different parts of a mesh
- Using vertex colors
- Defining color palettes
- Creating painting masks
- Making vertex paint renderable
- Setting Up Node Materials
- Adjusting your workspace to work with materials
- Working with nodes
- Understanding shaders
- Playing with Materials in Blender
- Understanding how light reflects
- Demystifying the Principled BSDF
- Color inputs
- Reflection and refraction inputs
- Subsurface scattering inputs
- Combining shaders with the Mix Shader node
- Playing with the Shader to RGB node
- Chapter 2 Giving Models Texture
- Adding Textures
- Discovering Procedural Textures
- Using Color Ramps
- Understanding Texture Mapping
- Making simple adjustments with the Texture Mapping panel
- Using texture coordinates
- Understanding Object coordinates and the UV Project modifier
- Unwrapping a Mesh
- Marking seams on a mesh
- Adding a test grid
- Generating and editing UV coordinates
- Painting Textures Directly on a Mesh
- Preparing to paint
- Working in Texture Paint mode
- Using textures on your Draw tool
- Saving Painted Textures and Exporting UV Layouts
- Chapter 3 Lighting and Environment
- Lighting a Scene
- Understanding a basic three-point lighting setup
- The key light
- The fill light
- The back light
- Knowing when to use which type of light
- Universal light options
- Light-specific options
- Using mesh lights in Cycles
- Understanding shadow maps in Eevee
- Lighting for Speedy Renders
- Working with three-point lighting in Blender
- Using light portals in Cycles
- Using Material Preview to set up lighting
- Setting Up the World
- Changing the sky to something other than dull gray
- Using high dynamic range images (HDRIs) for world lighting
- Understanding ambient occlusion
- Working with Light Probes in Eevee
- Baking from your light probes
- Understanding the limitations of light probes
- Chapter 4 Exporting and Rendering Scenes
- Blender's Render Engines
- Rendering a Scene
- Creating a still image
- Viewing your rendered images in Blender
- Picking an image format
- Setting dimensions for your renders
- Saving your still image
- Creating a sequence of still images for editing or compositing
- Rendering a sequence of images versus rendering video
- Working with Assets in Blender
- Building an asset library
- Customizing assets in the Asset Browser
- Creating a global asset library
- Exporting to external formats
- Importing from other applications
- Book 4 Get Animated!
- Chapter 1 Animating Objects
- Getting Started with Animation in Blender
- Creating the illusion of motion with static images
- Customizing your screen layout for animation
- Animating your first scene
- Understanding keyframes
- Inserting keys
- Animating [almost] anything
- Working with keying sets
- Using keying sets
- Creating custom keying sets
- Working in the Graph Editor
- Editing f-curves
- Using f-curve modifiers
- Chapter 2 Adding Controls to Your Scene
- Using Constraints Effectively
- The all-powerful Empty!
- Adjusting the influence of a constraint
- Using vertex groups in constraints
- Controlling the location, rotation, and scale of objects with transform constraints
- Copying the movement of another object
- Putting limits on an object
- Tracking the motion of another object
- Relationship constraints
- Getting Even More Control with Drivers
- What are drivers?
- When to use drivers
- Adding a driver quickly
- Understanding data paths
- Using the Drivers editor to build complex drivers
- Chapter 3 Rigging: The Art of Building an Animatable Puppet
- Creating Shape Keys
- Creating new shapes
- Mixing shapes
- Knowing where shape keys are helpful
- Adding Hooks
- Creating new hooks
- Knowing where hooks are helpful
- Using Armatures: Skeletons in the Mesh
- Editing armatures
- Parenting bones
- Armature properties
- Taking advantage of bendy bones
- Putting skin on your skeleton
- Quick-and-dirty skinning with envelopes
- Assigning weights to vertices
- Tweaking vertex weights in Weight Paint mode
- Bringing It All Together to Rig a Character
- Building Stickman's centerline
- Adding Stickman's appendages
- Taking advantage of parenting and constraints
- Comparing inverse kinematics and forward kinematics
- Making the rig more user friendly
- Working with Pose Libraries
- Building a pose library
- Using pose libraries
- Chapter 4 Animating Object Deformations
- Working with the Dope Sheet
- Selecting keys in the Dope Sheet
- Working with markers
- Recognizing different kinds of keyframe indicators
- Animating with Armatures
- Principles of animation worth remembering
- Making sense of quaternions (or, "Why are there four rotation curves?!")
- Copying mirrored poses
- Doing Nonlinear Animation
- Working with actions
- Mixing actions to create complex animation
- Taking advantage of looped animation
- Chapter 5 Letting Blender Do the Work for You
- Using Particles in Blender
- Knowing what particle systems are good for
- Customizing Emitter settings
- Choosing physics simulation models
- Creating a basic particle system
- Using force fields and collisions
- Creating hair and fur
- Working with Sculpt mode on hair curves
- Generating additional hair strands with hair assets in the Asset Browser
- Rendering hair in Eevee
- Rendering hair using Cycles
- Giving Objects Some Jiggle and Bounce
- Dropping Objects in a Scene with Rigid Body Dynamics
- Simulating Cloth
- Splashing Liquids in Your Scene
- Setting up a liquid simulation
- Making liquids renderable
- Baking liquids
- Smoking without Hurting Your Lungs: Smoke Simulation in Blender
- Creating a smoke simulation
- Rendering smoke
- Cheating (in a Good Way) by Using Quick Effects
- Chapter 6 Making 2D and 2.5D Animation with Grease Pencil
- Getting Started with the 2D Animation Workflow Template
- Working with Grease Pencil Tools
- Drawing with Grease Pencil
- Working with brushes for the Draw tool
- Customizing your Draw tool brushes
- Understanding the other tools in Draw mode
- Sculpting Grease Pencil objects
- Editing Grease Pencil objects
- Understanding Grease Pencil Materials
- Mastering Grease Pencil Layers
- Moving strokes to layers
- Tweaking your drawings with layer adjustments
- Automating Your Drawings with Grease Pencil Modifiers
- Modify modifiers
- Generate modifiers
- Deform modifiers
- Color modifiers
- Understanding Grease Pencil Effects
- Animating with Grease Pencil
- Using a hand-drawn animation workflow with Grease Pencil objects
- Rigging Grease Pencil objects for animation
- Integrating Grease Pencil with a 3D Scene
- Book 5 Sharing Your Work with the World
- Chapter 1 Editing Video and Animation
- Comparing Editing to Compositing
- Working with the Video Sequencer
- Adding and editing strips
- Adding effects and transitions
- Rendering from the Video Sequencer
- Chapter 2 Compositing Images and Video
- Understanding Nodes
- Getting Started with the Compositor
- Rendering in Passes and Layers
- Discovering passes available in Eevee and Cycles
- Data passes
- Light passes
- Cryptomatte passes
- Shader AOV passes
- Using Eevee-only Effects Passes
- Understanding Cycles-only Passes
- Working with Nodes
- Configuring the backdrop
- Discovering the nodes available to you
- Rendering from the Compositor
- Compositing in Real-Time in the 3D Viewport
- A Simple Example: Replacing a Texture without Re-rendering
- Setting up your render
- Bringing an image into the Compositor
- Replacing a texture with the Compositor
- Mixing lights and shadows with the replacement texture
- Mixing your remapped image with the original
- Chapter 3 Mixing Video and 3D with Motion Tracking
- Making Your Life Easier by Starting with Good Video
- Knowing your camera
- Keeping your lighting consistent
- Having images in good focus
- Understanding the scene
- Getting Familiar with the Motion Tracking Workspace
- Tracking Movement in Blender
- Adding markers and tracking
- Manually adding markers
- Automatically placing markers
- Tracking your footage
- Solving camera motion from tracker data
- Configuring your camera
- Solving (and re-solving)
- Defining scene orientation
- Setting up your scene for integrating with your video footage
- Where to Go from Here
- Book 6 Getting Technical
- Chapter 1 Working with Linked Data
- Appending and Linking Datablocks between Blender Files
- Appending datablocks
- Linking datablocks
- Taking Advantage of the Edit Linked Library Add-on
- Working with Library Overrides
- Creating a simple library override
- Making deeper library overrides from the Properties editor and Outliner
- Using library overrides with collections for linked characters
- Chapter 2 Automating Blender with Python Scripting
- Understanding the Usefulness of Automation
- Discovering Blender's Scripting Workspace
- Getting Familiar with the Python Language
- Writing Your First Blender Script
- Writing code in the Python Console
- Coding in the Text Editor
- Writing a more Blender-y "Hello World"
- Taking Advantage of Templates and Documentation
- Adding Custom Properties to Datablocks
- Index
- EULA
