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    CORE | Fundamentals of Texturing in Blender

    Instructor:
    Ewa Wierbik-ZiΔ…bka
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    The art of texturing in Blender: Bring Your 3D Models to Life with Realism and Detail

    Texturing adds essential details and realism to 3D models, making them look more lifelike and interesting. With just shaders and plain materials, your models might feel flat or incomplete.

    Get Caught Up

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    These courses should help you get up to speed in no time.

    BLENDER BASICS: An Introduction to Blender 3D 4.X

    Free

    PRESS START: Your Simple First Blender Project

    What you will learn in this Blender Class

    Texturing adds essential details and realism to 3D models, making them look more lifelike and interesting. With just shaders and plain materials, your models might feel flat or incomplete.

    The process of texturing involves applying images or procedural textures to 3D models to add detailed surface qualities like color and patterns. This process enhances the visual appeal of models by simulating intricate details and materials without adding extra geometry. Without effective texturing, achieving visually compelling and realistic results is challenging, as textures play a crucial role in bringing depth and character to your 3D projects.

    In this course, you'll dive into the essentials of texturing, from using shader nodes and unwrapping your models to painting and creating textures.

    You’ll learn to add realism with PBR techniques and get hands-on with procedural and hand-painted textures. By the end, you’ll master the complete texturing workflow and apply your skills to a final project, bringing your 3D models to life with incredible detail and creativity.Β 

    Chapter 1

    Introduction

    In this course, we will discover everything we need to know to start using textures in our projects. We will go through explaining different helpful nodes in shader editor, unwrapping, physically based rendering, procedural texturing, texture painting and an exercise to practice everything we’ve learned.

    Chapter 2

    The Basics of Textures

    In this chapter we will focus on the textures basics, such as explaining the socket color meaning, texture coordinates, various blend modes. We will also take a closer look at how to add more details to our models using normal maps and using adaptive subdivision and true displacement and what file types are the best for specific textures.

    Chapter 3

    Image Textures and Mapping

    Third chapter is all about preparing our mesh to use textures, so we will take a look at the UV Editor and go through a process of unwrapping. We will learn how and where to place the seams and how to solve most common problems with unwrapping as well as how to use multiple UV maps and how to animate UVs. To help to speed up and optimize the unwrapping process we will talk about smart projection, follow active quad method and other helpful UV addons we can use.

    Chapter 4

    Physically Based Rendering (PBR) Texturing

    In this chapter we will focus on the textures basics, such as explaining the socket color meaning, texture coordinates, various blend modes. We will also take a closer look at how to add more details to our models using normal maps and using adaptive subdivision and true displacement and what file types are the best for specific textures.

    Chapter 5

    Procedural Texturing

    In this chapter we will focus on creating procedural materials using different nodes that allow us to create seamless textures that we will combine into few nice examples, like procedural dust and dirt, green marble with gold intrusions and stylized sand with pebbles. It is also time for a first exercise to create a procedural rusty metal to experiment with the nodes to get the desired result.

    Chapter 6

    Texture Painting

    In the sixth chapter we will go through the process of preparing our models to be texture painted and learn what to pay attention to while checking modifiers, scale or naming the objects. After that we will learn how the texture paint mode works and we will create some brushes and other tools that will help us during painting. We will also learn how to use layers to paint even more details and do not overpaint already created textures to work non destructively and see what else we can use for texturing.

    Chapter 7

    The Complete Texturing Workflow

    This last chapter will be all about the whole process of preparing the mesh, unwrapping, painting textures by hand using all the tools we’ve learned, using procedural textures to add even more details and then baking everything into one set of PBR textures and learning about the different methods of packing textures to use them in different render engines. After the whole course there is an exercise where you will hand paint the robot model to really nail down everything you've learned.

    Let's dive into textures in Blender!

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    Course Curriculum
    7 Reviews
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      bwilhelm ·

      Absolutely fantastic! Although not quite as user friendly as some of the other CORE classes and therefore maybe slightly intermediate, this course provides very useful knowledge, examples, and exercises. The material is not spoon-fed, and at times you will have to figure out a thing or two on your own, but my experience was that the process of figuring out the unclear parts myself strengthened my understanding of the subject more than if it had been spoon-fed. I particularly enjoyed the sections on procedural materials and textures, as it was eye opening to learn how many kinds of surfaces you can model with Blender.

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      Zhaoqun Wang(queenawzq) ·

      She gives very complex examples, her voice sounds like she is reading a script, and there's no title or anything to indicate when she jumps to the next section, which makes it very hard to follow.

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      Can Manalp(CanManalp) ·
      I couldn't get past chapter 5 because she is doing something on her own andΒ  I don't get any of this even If I have a basic knowledge of texturing.
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      ~Ivy~ ·

      This course covered A LOT of ground. Some of it I was familiar with, like procedural texturing and UVs, but texture painting was a new area.

      Speaking of texture painting, it was very relaxing to watch Ewa paint the binoculars, especially with the background music. The end result looks similar to world of warcraft assets. Perhaps blizzard artists use a similar texture painting process?

      Overall very happy with this course.

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      chanwook park(seven1028) ·

      I find that this course seems to be less organized compared to the other core courses. The explanations could benefit from a bit more structure to make them easier for students to follow.

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      Sascha Feider(SFE-Viz) ·

      This course is a great resource and introduction into the whole workflow of texturing, be it with procedural textures or texture painting. It's obvious Ewa has a passion for the topic and it translates into clear instructions that are easy to follow, even if you're new to the topic. I'll definitely come back to this whenever I hit a road block in my texturing.

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      Dwayne Savage(dillenbata3) ·

      I learned a lot. Thanks for including the channel packing. I've always done it with gimp and this method is much better. I also like the in depth coverage of texture painting.Β