Richard Leggett on New Media

If you’re not familiar with Blender, it’s one of the most impressive pieces of 3D modeling, animation, rendering and game-creation software ever made. It can easily compete with high-end software like 3DS Max and Maya (proof), added to that it’s 100% free. For this, it deserves some attention!

Unfortunately having used 3DS Max, Maya and Blender myself, it’s very clear Blender has always suffered from a desperately unforgiving user interface. By that I mean you really need some help learning the basics, there are so many things that it simply expects you to know the shortcut key for due to the minimal interface, but this has improved significantly just recently.

Of course this ties in nicely to the book review, which is of course the perfect thing to bridge that gap between initial bewilderment, and zen guru-like control of Blender.

Blender 3D 2.49 Incredible Machines written by Allan Brito is suitable for people who already have basic knowledge of Blender, but not necessarily loads. I recommend you follow the intro tutorials before diving in.

The books theme, if you hadn’t guessed, is beautiful mechanical creatures, machines, spacecraft and weapons. The theme could have been anything, but this one nicely captures the imagination, and deals heavily with polygonal modeling especially suitable for game assets.

I’ve mentioned poly(gonal) modeleling, in fact that’s the first technique encountered, you can model almost anything using this process, starting with a crude plane or cube, extruding, splitting and rotating faces until you end up with a boxy looking figure which can be further refined or smoothed to the required finish and detail. The weapon chosen, a rifle, provides most of the usual stumbling blocks you’d encounter and neatly explains the tools and techniques required to complete the model.

The next subject is the Yafray rendering engine, which can provide ultra realistic ray traced graphics, suitable for motion graphics, FMVs or stills. Of course this chapter also covers applying materials to the models and setting up light sources to set the scene and add realism.

We then move on to more advanced modelling, this time a steampunk spacecraft. This section is much more difficult, I learned some new techniques such as extruding bezier curves along a path and then twisting the solid 3D result in order to form some twisted cables. Finally UV mapping is covered, unfolding the entire model to apply texture details to all the panels and surfaces. This is increasingly relevant for other Flash developers, using engines like Away3D and Papervision, you will no doubt have to use these techniques along the way (along with texture baking of course).

Now something all geeks love, particles. Blender has a fully customisable built in particle engine in this case used to produce the spacecraft exhaust.

The book then moves on to even more advanced techniques, used to create a robot. These include some of the built in modifiers (something I always found very accessible in 3DS Max, but less so in Blender). The author uses LuxRender to apply some bling in the highly reflective metallic textures. In fact here’s a great video that shows the end result…

Finally we complete the project with animation, using pivots and curves, this pretty much covers the majority of what you’d want to do in Blender (unless you are using the game engine).

This book immediately gets my vote because quite simply, imho, when getting to grips with Blender you can do with as much help as possible. It’s a truly amazing application but getting tips and techniques like these from the experienced guys is great.

You can buy the book from Packt as PDF or hardcopy.