About This Book Page 14 Blender Foundation Foreword Page 16 How to Use This Book Page 18 01. Introduction Page 22 What is Blender? Page 22 Blender's History Page 23 About Free Software and the GPL Page 25 Getting support the Blender community Page 26 Downloading and installing the binary distribution Page 28 02. Installation Page 28 Windows, MacOS X, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris Page 29 Building Blender from source Page 33 Technical Support Page 37 03. Understanding the Interface Page 38 Blender's Interface Concept Page 38 Keyboard and mouse Page 38 Window types Page 41 Contextes, Panels and Buttons Page 42 Toolbox Page 45 Screens Page 45 Navigating in 3D Space Page 46 The viewing direction (rotating) Page 46 Translating and Zooming the View Page 48 Perspective and Orthographic Projection Page 48 Draw mode Page 50 Local view Page 50 The layer system Page 50 The vital functions Page 51 04. Quickstart Page 56 Your first animation in 30 + 30 minutes Page 56 Warming up Page 56 Building the body Page 56 Let's see what Gus looks like Page 63 Materials and Textures Page 68 Rigging Page 74 Skinning Page 76 Posing Page 78 Gus walks! Page 82 05. Object Mode Page 86 Moving (translating) objects Page 87 Rotating objects Page 87 Scaling/mirroring objects Page 89 Transform Properties Panel Page 90 Duplicate Page 90 Parenting (Grouping) Page 90 Tracking Page 91 Other Actions Page 92 Boolean operations Page 92 06. Mesh Modeling Page 96 Basic Objects Page 96 EditMode Page 98 Basic Editing Page 100 Mesh Undo Page 103 Smoothing Page 103 Proportional Editing Tool Page 106 Extrude Page 108 Spin and SpinDup Page 112 Screw Page 117 Noise Page 118 Warp Tool Page 119 Catmull-Clark Subdivision Surfaces Page 120 Edge Tools Page 124 Knife Tool Page 124 Face Loop Page 125 Meta Objects Page 126 07. Curves and Surfaces Page 128 Curves Page 128 Beziers Page 128 NURBS Page 130 Working example Page 131 Surfaces Page 136 Text Page 137 Special Characters Page 138 Extrude Along a Path Page 140 Skinning Page 143 08. Materials and Textures Page 146 Diffusion Page 147 Specular Reflection Page 148 Materials in practice Page 150 Material Colors Page 150 The Shaders Page 151 Tweaking Materials Page 152 Textures Page 153 ImageTexture Page 158 Multiple Materials Page 160 Special Materials Page 162 Solid and Hollow Glass Page 171 UV editor and FaceSelect Page 175 Texture Plugins Page 179 09. Lighting Page 180 Introduction Page 180 Lamp Types Page 181 Sun Light Page 182 Hemi Light Page 184 Lamp Light Page 184 Spot Light Page 189 Spot Buttons Page 190 Shadows Page 190 Volumetric Light Page 192 Tweaking Light Page 194 Three point light Page 196 Three point light Outdoor Page 198 Area Light Page 200 Global Illumination (and Global Shadowing) Page 204 10. The World and the Universe Page 208 The World Background Page 208 Mist Page 210 Stars Page 212 Ambient Light Page 212 11. Animation of Undeformed Objects Page 216 IPO Block Page 217 Key Frames Page 217 The IPO Curves Page 218 IPO Curves and IPO Keys Page 222 Other applications of IPO Curves Page 224 The Time IPO Page 224 Path Animation Page 226 12. Animation of Deformations Page 230 Absolute Vertex Keys Page 230 Curve and Surface Keys Page 234 Lattice Keys Page 234 Relative Vertex Keys Page 234 Lattice Animation Page 239 13. Character Animation Page 242 Introduction: Light, Camera and Action Page 242 General Tools Page 243 The Armature Object Page 244 Bones Naming Page 245 Parenting and IK chain Page 246 The Armature Panel Page 248 Skinning Page 248 Vertex Groups Page 249 Weight Painting Page 250 Posemode Page 251 Action Window Page 252 Non Linear Animation Page 254 Working with Action Strips Page 256 Constraints Page 257 Constraint Types Page 258 Constraints Evaluation Rules and Precedence Page 260 Influence Page 261 Rigging a Hand and a Foot Page 262 Rigging Mechanics Page 272 How to setup a walkcycle using NLA Page 280 14. Rendering Page 290 Rendering by Parts Page 291 Panoramic renderings Page 291 Antialiasing Page 292 Output formats Page 294 Rendering Animations Page 296 Motion Blur Page 296 Depth of Field Page 298 Cartoon Edges Page 302 The Unified Renderer Page 304 Preparing your work for video Page 304 Color Saturation Page 306 Rendering to fields Page 306 15. Radiosity Page 308 The Blender Radiosity method Page 308 Radiosity Rendering Page 312 Radiosity as a Modelling Tool Page 314 Phase 1: Collect Meshes Page 315 Phase 2: Subdivision limits Page 316 Phase 3: Adaptive Subdividing Page 316 Phase 4: Editing the solution Page 318 Radiosity Juicy example Page 319 Setting up Page 320 The Sky Dome Page 320 The Radiosity solution Page 322 Texturing Page 324 16. Special Modeling Techniques Page 330 Introduction Page 330 DupliVerts Page 330 DupliFrames Page 337 More Animation and Modeling Page 342 Modeling with lattices Page 345 How does it work? Page 346 17. Effects Page 350 Introduction Page 350 Build Effect Page 350 Particle Effects Page 351 First Particle System Page 352 Rendering a particle system Page 353 Objects as particles Page 354 Setting Dupliverted Particles Page 355 Making fire with particles Page 356 The particle system Page 356 The fire-material Page 357 Simple explosion A Page 359 Controlling Particles via a Lattice Page 362 Static Particles Page 365 Wave Effect Page 367 18. Volumetric Effects Page 370 19. Sequence Editor Page 376 Learning the Sequence Editor Page 376 First animation: two cubes Page 376 First Sequence: delayed wireframe animation Page 378 Second animation: A delayed solid cube Page 380 Third animation: a tunnel Page 382 Second sequence: Using the tunnel as a backdrop Page 386 Fourth Animation: a jumping logo Page 386 Fifth Animation: particle bars Page 386 Third sequence: Combining the logo and the particle bars Page 388 Sixth Animation: zooming logo Page 390 Assembling everything so far Page 390 Conclusion Page 392 Sound Sequence Editor Page 392 Sequence Editor Plugins Page 394 20. Python Scripting Page 398 Setting PYTHONPATH Page 400 A working Python example Page 401 Headers, importing modules and globals Page 402 Drawing the GUI Page 403 Managing Events Page 404 Mesh handling Page 405 Conclusions Page 407 Python Reference and Scripts Page 407 21. Blender's Plugin System Page 408 Writing a Texture Plugin Page 408 Specification Page 409 Compiling Page 416 Writing Sequence Plugin a Page 416 Specification Page 416 Our Modifications Page 420 Compiling Page 422 22. From Blender to YafRay using Yable Page 426 What is Yable? Page 426 Which Yable? Page 426 Where to get YableX? Page 427 Installing the script Page 427 The Interface Page 428 Workflow philosophy Page 428 Global Settings Page 428 Rendering settings Page 433 Material Settings Page 435 Light Settings Page 440 Yable Juicy example Page 444 23. YafRay Page 448 Installation Page 449 Scene Description Language Overview Page 451 Shaders Page 453 Meta Shaders Page 455 Renderable Objects Page 461 Lights Page 462 Background Page 470 Camera Page 472 Render Page 472 Filters Page 474 24. Blender Windows Page 478 The Mouse Page 478 The Window Header Page 479 25. Hotkeys In-Depth Reference Page 480 Window Hotkeys Page 480 Universal Hotkeys Page 481 Object Mode Hotkeys Page 485 Edit Mode Hotkeys General Page 496 Edit Mode Mesh Hotkeys Page 497 Edit Mode Curve Hotkeys Page 500 Edit Mode Surface Hotkeys Page 502 Edit Mode Metaball Hotkeys Page 503 Edit Mode Font Hotkeys Page 503 Armature Hotkeys Page 504 VertexPaint Hotkeys Page 505 FaceSelect Hotkeys Page 505 26. Windows Reference Page 506 The InfoWindow Page 506 The FileWindow Page 513 The 3DWindow Page 521 The IPO Window Page 529 The Sequence Window Page 539 The OopsWindow Page 544 The Action Window Page 549 The Non Linear Animation Window Page 552 The Text Window Page 556 The Audio Timeline Window Page 559 The ImageWindow Page 561 The ImageSelectWindow Page 564 The Animation Playback Window Page 567 27. Buttons Reference Page 570 The Buttons Window Page 570 Logic Context Page 572 Script Links Linking scripts to Blender Page 574 Shading Context Page 576 Lamp Sub-context Material Sub-context Page 576 Texture Sub-context Page 600 Radiosity Sub-context Page 615 World Sub-context Page 620 Object Context Page 626 Editing Context Page 639 Scene Context Page 666 Rendering Sub-context Page 666 Animation/Playback Sub-context Page 674 Sound Sub-context Page 675 Panels out of the Buttons Window Page 678 3D ViewPort Page 678 IPO Window Page 681 28. Command Line Arguments Page 682 Render Options Page 683 Animation Options Page 684 Window Options Page 684 Other Options Page 684 29. Blender 2.32 Release Page 688 Rendering Page 688 Displacement mapping Page 693 Blender 2.32 Yafray Page 696 Blender 2.32 new features and fixes Page 697 A. Quick Hotkeys List Page 704 B. Supported Videocards Page 724 C. Blender 2.31 Changelog Page 732 D. The Blender Documentation Project Page 738 E. Joining the Coders Page 740 F. Licenses Page 742 G. Glossary Page 752 H. Index Page 762