Low Poly 3D Modeling in Blender: Kickstart your career as a 3D artist by learning how to create low poly assets and scenes from scratch

by Samuel Sullins

Speed up your workflows with this practical guide to low poly 3D modeling in Blender 3D modeling in Blender can get extremely tedious, especially when you have to animate a lot of frames. If you want to perfect your animations rather than spend loads of time on your models, then we’ve got you covered with A 3D Artist’s Guide to Learning Low Poly Modeling in Blender. This book takes you on an exciting journey from the basics of low poly modeling in Blender to creating a simple animation with your low poly assets. You’ll apply the skills you learn to build a low poly farm scene, complete with animals, people, vehicles, and furniture. You’ll learn the important design aspects of each element in the scene, from the vegetation to the hairstyles of the characters! Once the scene is built, you’ll take a look at Blender’s two rendering engines, Cycles and EEVEE, so that you can see the practical differences between them. Then you’ll animate the characters, bringing the scene to life! The book concludes with some advice on making your way in the 3D industry and accelerating your career as a 3D artist. By the end of this book, you will be creating and animating 3D scenes in Blender faster than ever before, thanks to the power of low poly modeling. Intermediate 3D artists and generalists who want to step into the exciting world of low poly modeling, reduce their workload and quickly model their objects will benefit from this book. Beginners who want to learn 3D modeling in Blender but don't know how to embark on their journey can also start with learning the low poly modeling technique presented in this book. It is assumed that you have a basic knowledge of the Blender interface.

288 pages, Paperback

Published February 2, 2024

Reviews

[Harry Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great introduction to Blender from an author who is clearly very passionate about the subject.

I really enjoyed going through this book; the projects are simple enough to form concise, individual chapters, and they build on one another nicely to slowly improve your skills. The author also stops explaining things that were covered in earlier chapters if they get reused which really helps you make sure that you are retaining the knowledge. It's worth noting too that I went through the book using Blender v4.1 (the author is using v3.3) and I had no issues, so don't be turned off if you see that the book is not using Blender 4 - it's all still relevant.

Unfortunately, the book is not immune to some of the issues that are endemic to books from Packt Publishing. There are sometimes instructions that do not quite match the images, and there is quite a lot of repetition in the writing (in conversational parts, not instructional parts) that just make for awkward reading. Both things that could/should have been fixed by a proofreader, but it's clear to me after reading several of their books that Packt do not use them.

I would also have loved to see some more information on materials or even some basic shaders. The modelling instruction here is great, but the final projects do cry out for materials that are more than just block colours which can be either shiny or not shiny. I think there would have been room for that had some of the repetition been cleaned up, but the book is still good for the modelling side.

Ultimately, I was able to expand on some of the projects from the book and take on some completely new ones after finishing without having to look up any extra tutorials, which is both a testament to the author's teaching ability and the reason I would recommend this book to Blender newcomers. He also has a YouTube channel which looks like it has a lot more tutorials/demos on it so definitely will be subscribing there as well!