Mastering Blender

Create Amazing 3D Animations As You Build Your Blender Skills

Are you ready to push the envelope on your Blender abilities? This professional resource takes you step by step through intermediate and advanced techniques for Blender's modeling, texturing, scripting, game–creation, and visual effects tools. It covers advanced topics on sculpting, compositing, and video editing, as well as provides a complete introduction to Python® scripting suitable for people with no programming background.

Intermediate Blender users will explore specific workflow topics that will help boost productivity and enhance the quality of their work. Advanced users will find tips and techniques not covered elsewhere that will help them optimize Blender's functionality for professional projects. Learn how to create assets for use in a game engine, how to use Python in the game engine environment, and much more.

If you want professional tips to reach new heights and create visually stunning 3D animations in Blender, this is the book for you.

The CD includes Blender 2.48 installers for Windows and Macintosh, a source tarball for users of Linux and other flavors of Unix, and a variety of .blend files.

Learn video editing and compositing with the Blender Video Sequence Editor and node–based compositor

Learn advanced texturing tricks, such as how to use Blender's own 2D texture painting functionality to create game assets

1. Controlling Your Environment.

2. Sculpting and Retopo Workflow.

3. Creating Realistic Images with UV Textures and Node–Based Materials.

4. Video Compositing with Nodes.

5. Working with the Video Sequence Editor.

Part II: Mastering Blender Python.

6. Python for the Impatient.

7. Python Scripting for Blender.

8. The Many–Headed Snake: Other Uses of Python in Blender.

Part III: Mastering the Blender Game Engine.

9. Creating Assets for the Blender Game Engine.

10. Making Things Happen in the Game Engine.

11. Python Power in the Blender Game Engine.

Tony Mullen, PhD, has a broad background in CG–related work. He teaches at Tsuda College, where his courses include modeling and animation with Blender as well as the Python programming language (used for scripting in Blender). Mullen has been a cartoonist and an illustrator; his screen credits include writer, codirector, or lead animator on several short films, including the award–winning short The Devices of Gustav Braüstache, Bachelor of Science, and the recent live–action/stop–motion film Gustav Braüstache and the Auto Debilitator, appearing at several international film festivals. He is the author of Introducing Character Animation with Blender and Bounce, Tumble, and Splash!: Simulating the Physical World with Blender 3D, both from Sybex.