Table of Contents
Part I: Getting Started with Blender
Chapter 1: Discovering Blender
Discovering Blender's origins and the strength of the Blender community
Working with an interface that stays out of your way
Chapter 2: Understanding How Blender Thinks
Understanding the Properties editor
Customizing Blender to Fit You
Navigating in Three Dimensions
Orbiting, panning, and zooming the 3D View
Taking advantage of the 3D cursor
Don't know how to do something? Hooray for fully integrated search!
Chapter 3: Getting Your Hands Dirty Working in Blender
Grabbing, Scaling, and Rotating
Differentiating Between Coordinate Systems
Transforming an Object by Using the 3D Manipulator
Hotkeys and coordinate systems
Chapter 4: Working in Edit Mode and Object Mode
Making Changes by Using Edit Mode
Distinguishing between Object mode and Edit mode
Selecting vertices, edges, and faces
Still Blender's No. 1 modeling tool: Extrude
Meet Suzanne, the Blender monkey
Joining and separating objects
Discovering parents, children, and groups
Saving, opening, and appending
Part II: Creating Detailed 3D Scenes
Chapter 5: Creating Anything You Can Imagine with Meshes
Understanding edge loops and face loops
Simplifying Your Life as a Modeler with Modifiers
Doing half the work (and still looking good!) with the Mirror modifier
Smoothing things out with the Subdivision Surface modifier
Sculpting with the Multiresolution modifier
Freeform sculpting with dynamic topology (Dyntopo)
Understanding the basics of retopology
Chapter 6: Using Blender's Non-mesh Primitives
Understanding the different types of curves
Understanding the strengths and limitations of Blender's surfaces
What metaball objects are useful for
Converting to curves and meshes
Chapter 7: Changing That Boring Gray Default Material
Understanding Materials and Render Engines
Assigning multiple materials to different parts of a mesh
Setting Up Node Materials in Cycles
Adjusting your layout to work with node materials
Playing with Materials in Blender Internal
Controlling how materials handle shadows
Chapter 8: Giving Models Texture
Working with textures in Blender Internal
Including textures on a Cycles material
Understanding Blender Internal's procedurals
Discovering procedurals in Cycles
Applying textures when using Blender Internal
Mapping textures when using Cycles
Generating and editing UV coordinates
Painting Textures Directly on a Mesh
Saving painted textures and exporting UV layouts
Baking Texture Maps from Your Mesh
Discovering texture bake options in BI
Discovering texture bake options in Cycles
Chapter 9: Lighting and Environment
Understanding a basic three-point lighting setup
Knowing when to use which type of lamp
Working with three-point lighting in Blender
Creating a fake Area light with buffered Spots
Changing the sky to something other than dull gray
Understanding ambient occlusion
Customizing your screen layout for animation
Adjusting the influence of a constraint
Using vertex groups in constraints
Copying the movement of another object
Tracking the motion of another object
Chapter 11: Discovering the Tools Used in Rigging
Knowing where shape keys are helpful
Knowing where hooks are helpful
Using Armatures: Skeletons in the Mesh
Chapter 12: Animating Object Deformations
Principles of animation worth remembering
Making sense of quaternions (or, “Why are there four rotation curves?!”)
Seeing the big picture with ghosting
Mixing actions to create complex animation
Taking advantage of looped animation
Chapter 13: Letting Blender Do the Work for You
Knowing what particle systems are good for
Using force fields and collisions
Using particles for hair and fur
Giving Objects Some Jiggle and Bounce
Dropping Objects in a Scene with Rigid Body Dynamics
Splashing Fluids in Your Scene
Smoking without Hurting Your Lungs: Smoke Simulation in Blender
Rendering smoke using Blender Internal
Part IV: Sharing Your Work with the World
Chapter 14: Exporting and Rendering Scenes
Creating a sequence of still images for editing or compositing
Chapter 15: Compositing and Editing
Comparing Editing to Compositing
Working with the Video Sequence Editor
Rendering from the Video Sequence Editor
Working with the Node-Based Compositor
Understanding the benefits of rendering in passes and layers
Discovering the nodes available to you
Rendering from the Node Compositor
Chapter 16: Ten Problems (and Solutions) for Newbies
Blender's Interface Is Weird or Glitchy
A Notorious Black Stripe Appears on Models
Objects Don't Appear When Rendering
Funky Deformations in Animation Rigs
Chapter 17: Ten Tips for Working More Effectively in Blender
Use Tooltips and Integrated Search
Look at Models from Different Views
Lock a Camera to an Animated Character
Do Low-Resolution Test Renders
Chapter 18: Ten Excellent Community Resources