Witold Jaworski has updated the 3rd volume of his Virtual Airplane series for Blender 2.7.
The updated 3rd volume ("Materials and Textures") of the "Virtual Airplane" series has been available since beginning of this year. It is a kind of guide to "hard surface" materials in Cycles. It starts with the absolute basics: an introduction to the Cycles renderer and the simplest scene/materials setup. Further chapters introduce and explain subsequent additional features, ultimately obtaining convincing materials of various aircraft skins. One of them is depicted on the book cover. You can also find here many background information: what the IOR coefficient is and how to mimic it in Cycles for various real-world materials, what precisely do the popular color operations (Blend, Multiply, Divide, Lighten, Darken ...) do with the color components, etc. I think that illustrated books like this one are better in describing such abstract subjects than video tutorials. This book does not focus solely on Blender, but shows the complete solutions. You can learn here how to paint convincing scratches in GIMP or quickly create complete reflectivity texture using powerful SVG filters in Inkscape. This third edition of “Virtual Airplane” series describes Blender 2.72, GIMP 2.8 and Inkscape 0.48. Volume 3 is one of the thickest books about Blender on its own: 636 print pages, 1100 illustrations. It is accompanied by many source files that correspond to every stage of the described workflow.
All volumes of the 3rd edition are available in the three most popular ebook formats: PDF, MOBI and EPUB.
The last, fourth volume will appear at the end of February - somewhat later than it was originally promised (in the previous post on this subject that appeared last autumn).
2 Comments
I've corresponded with Witold off and on for a couple of years now. I've also purchased his original Volume second edition and the updated third edition of his tutorial as they've been published. The first edition began with Blender 2.4x, and he has updated his tutorials as Blender has changed over the years. He tells me that he will continue to update these volumes as Blend evolves.
Witold is a perfectionist, a very serious modeler, and I doubt you will find a tutorial this extensive on all aspects of Blender modeling, add-on functions including several he wrote himself, Gimp, and Inkscape as a complete A to Z modeling of the P-40B Warhawk aircraft. Altogether, Witold's three volumes on modeling the P-40B total more than 1,300 pages with about 4,000 images. They are well worth the price even if they seem a bit daunting at first.
His instructions and examples on texturing are worth the price alone.
And as a bonus, I've found Witold to be extremely helpful in helping me along, evaluating my work, offering suggestions, and when I mention that I'm having problems finding good diagrams or blueprints for my next project, I discover that he has emailed me many great links to references and the works of other for inspiration and details. He is very generous with his time.
You can also find many of Witold's comments on the Blender Artists forums as he offers comments and suggestions on various projects. Those insights alone are worth the time to read through some of them.
The bottom line is that I give his tutorials five thumbs up. I also give Witold five thumbs up for his sincere interest in helping others to improve their modeling skill at a personal level.
Thank you BMF! I promise to do my best!