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    CORE | Fundamentals of Texturing in Blender

    Instructor:
    Ewa Wierbik-Ziąbka
    Subscribe
    ☆☆☆☆☆
     ( 18 )

    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.

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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

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    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. 

    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
    18 Reviews
    • r
      ☆☆☆☆☆
      Robert Obert(robertobert) ·
      This course is difficult to follow.  Connections between concepts and instructions are not always clearly described, and pronunciation issues compound the problem. To follow along, I'm forced to constantly replay segments to understand.  It shouldn't be this hard to cover basic material like this.  Recommend Lampel or Trammel as instructors instead.  Their lessons are examples of how Blender should be taught.
    • T
      ☆☆☆☆☆
      Maiil Tahiiev(ThatsHim) ·

      I'm so happy with the two courses I had by Ewa. I've learned the things I wanted to learn for my projects, and I learned even more than I expected. In my personal opinion, the level of information here can be compared with some universities (don't be afraid). Yes, it takes quite time to follow up the information, there's a lot of information, but it's totally worth it. It's better to have a lot of information and never ask questions or find answers somewhere outthere, piece by piece. And if you think about it, having that much knowledge can help you build a good portfolio with time in a potential career. Now I'll practice and practice makes man perfect. Very detailed and deep courses.

    • R
      ☆☆☆☆☆
      Rex Hindrichs(RexHindrichs) ·

      I gotta say, compared to the previous CORE modules, this course was MUCH harder to follow along to. The material is fairly comprehensive, but the instructor does not really take the time to walk you through what she's doing. I had to supplement this one with lots of YouTube to properly absorb the material. 

    • ☆☆☆☆☆
      Jairus Francois(ONYXRage) ·

      This course was overall information heavy and presents much of it to you at face value. Though that is not necessarily a good thing. The point of a fundamentals course it to present the information as simple as possible, aka "explain like I'm 5."

      The instructor is very knowledgeable and her passion for texturing and materials shows through. Except passion and knowledge do not automatically transfer into being a good teacher. There are many times when information is skipped, read "script-like", or not explained well enough. Using timelapses because the content is "boring" should never be an excuse, because even when watching and explaining what you did, you can never explain how and why you did it in the moment. Using timelapses should be done for repetitive actions after they have been explained thoroughly.  

      This course should be treated more as a refresher if you have prior experience and want to get deeper into the knowledge and not as a beginners intro into the world of texturing (and materials as both coincide with one another). Unfortunately compared to prior courses in the fundamental series up to this point, if going in order, this one drops the ball on clarity and beginner friendliness. Be prepared to seek outside information for clarity or take the previous course on fundamentals on texturing here.

    • l
      ☆☆☆☆☆
      Jonathan Guttke(lifeprilis) ·
      Course was rly good. Learned a ton.
      Took me some time but  i knew that. For me it was more than easy. But if i do this like 10 times it will stick. As with all things PRACTICE. The layout and speed all good. Its just my own brain thats slower xD Ty so much for this course !
    • J
      ☆☆☆☆☆
      Jim Mitchell(Jlapeno) ·

      I learned a lot a core concepts in the course that I was very excited to final get a good handle on. The instructor was evidently very knowledgeable, however it didn't always translate to easy learning outcomes. Clearly there was the assumption that the learner had previous knowledge as there were many cases where instructions were abbreviated and rushed through (had to slow down the video to even be able to infer some steps at all). Additionally, there was very little foundational motivation as to the "Why's" of what were were about to do (thankfully I stumbled upon Blender Guru's excellent - and free - youtube texturing 2 hour video that did this SUPERBLY). Finally, and most disappointingly: the subject of high poly baking to low poly meshes, something CLEARLY and squarely within the course curriculum wasn't mentioned at all and this was something I really was hoping would be covered.

      In the future, I think revisiting this in a Lampell or Andrew Price style of deliberate, methodological and slow teaching would serve this critical module well. The other teachers and modules have been spot on and thoroughly useful/helpful. Great job on those.

    • ☆☆☆☆☆
      Keswick Chow(kchow) ·

      She is knowledgeable in texturing.  And the lessons are clearly explained.  And the best about the course is that the inclusions of all lessons files to be used along with the lessons.  The lessons learnt through working along with those work files.  The inclusion of baking textures and channel packing in blender are super useful to learn too.

    • O
      ☆☆☆☆☆
      Jeremiquiii fabio(Onionhead) ·

      This is not a fundamentals, This is more like a crash course for rusty users. The trainer is knowledgeable but skips important steps, not connecting one part to the next. For example the stenciles used for texture painting was not shown how to create, where to save and store so can use when needed. It's not a great course for beginners...

    • t
      ☆☆☆☆☆
      Kim Tollefsen(tollefsen) ·

      This course really helped me demystifying several elements that I had struggled with in the past.

      That said, I felt it was a bit overwhelming sometimes and went past the fundementals of texturing, but that could just be me as I`m slow:D

      As I have gained a much better understanding of how the texturing works in Blender, I would recommend this course to others.

    • z
      ☆☆☆☆☆
      zchudson ·

      I found some parts of this course a bit hard to follow, specifically the procedural textures and the different nodes in the shader view and what they do.  I was able to slow down and rewatch the video a few times to get the gist of it, but I think the examples might be a bit too complex for a CORE course?  The texture painting section was amazing though, and I definitely learned a lot overall.

    In playlist: CORE | Nine Course Fundamental Learning Path