Welcome!

Welcome to Learning Blender: A Hands-On Guide to Creating 3D Animated Characters. In this book, you’ll learn how to use Blender to complete a complex project. The book covers every part of the process so you will understand what is involved in the creation of a 3D character and can decide which part of that process you most enjoy and might want to explore further. In other words, this is not a specialized book that will make you a modeling genius or an expert animator; instead, it will help you understand every part of the animation process. The idea is that once you finish reading this book, you will have the knowledge to take any project from preproduction to the final result.

If you’re a freelancer (or want to be), this book is tailored for you because freelancers often get small jobs requiring a great variety of skills. Thus, having basic or medium skills in diverse tasks can be more useful than being very good at just a single specific skill.

If you want to work for a big company and prefer to be specialized, it is also helpful to understand the complete animation process; for example, if you’re a modeler but you understand how rigging works, when you create your models you’ll be able to identify any possible issues your rigger colleagues may encounter and that will help you make their work easier. When you work on a team, you’ll only work on a portion of the project, but if you have some understanding of what the rest of the team’s job is, your work will be more valuable to them, and everyone will be happier!

You may already be familiar with Blender and want to learn about 3D character creation. In that case, you can probably skip the first three chapters and go straight to the parts of the book that describe character creation. (Do this only if you’re completely sure you understand the basics of Blender.)

Finally, if you just want to get started in this amazing world of 3D animation and jump into a fantastic journey, this book will provide you with detailed insights on how to handle 3D projects. If you’ve never used 3D software before, don’t worry if it initially looks a bit overwhelming—that’s normal; the software provides lots of options and unique features that may be unfamiliar to you. While we often tend to be intimidated by what we don’t know, if you keep exploring and practicing, you’ll soon begin to enjoy the learning process and your results will reflect the effort you’ve invested. Good luck!