Blender Complete

In the first chapter, we'll become familiar with Blender's layout and controls. Blender was designed to be hot key intensive, so there will be an emphasis on learning hot keys to make navigation and control as fluid as possible.

In this chapter, we'll delve deeper in the the Interface, learn some "best practices", and learn many essential tools to help us edit and manipulate the meshes in our scenes.

In this chapter, we'll step into edit mode. Edit mode is where all the magic really starts to happen! We've reached the point where chapters will continue to contain recordings in the video textbook fashion we're used to, but now the chapter will end with a lab section! Time to start our actual projects!

Time to apply everything we've learned! We'll be creating an environment for a future animation project, and we'll bring many of the skills we've learned so far into the project. We'll also get the chance to learn a couple of new hot keys, as well as get an early look at a couple of modifiers to help us out. Our environment will be a small sea-side home and bridge, and by the end you'll be able to make some of your own modifications to suit your taste. Let's go build stuff!

In this short, but very important chapter we'll look at the five different ways Blender deals with pivot points. We'll cover how that affects our work in both Object and Edit modes. Pivot points aren't the most exciting subject in 3D, but understanding how to manipulate them to your advantage is crucial to getting the results you want quickly and effectively.

In this chapter we'll take a closer look at some of the techniques we've touched on. We'll also learn about modeling with Bezier Curves, what a Bezier Curve is, and the several different ways we can manipulate them to create new objects!

In this chapter we'll have a look at materials in Blender for the Blender Internal Renderer. Although many of your future projects will be rendered in Cycles, it's important to have a thorough understanding of materials to make Cycles and it's node system easier to understand. There are also cases where the internal renderer will suffice and would be faster than Cycles.

In this chapter we'll cover the various forms of lighting available in the standard renderer. We have five available to us with a number of parameters to get the effect we want. We'll also look at the world editor, as well as parenting and constraining our lamps.