Introduction to blender in 3d design animation
- 1. 2D DESIGN
- 2. WHAT IS BLENDER? Blender is a 3D modeling and animation studio package. If you are familiar with Autodesk Maya, Autodesk 3ds Max, NewTek LightWave, or other 3D modeling/animation applications, you’ll have an idea of what Blender is like. If not, don’t worry, you’re in for a treat. Think of animated cartoons, along the lines of those produced by DreamWorks, Pixar, and so forth. Think in terms of Shrek, Toy Story, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Kung-Fu Panda, VeggieTales, and so on. While those movies may not have actually used Blender (I’m throwing out random examples that most readers have heard of to give you an idea), they are in the genre of 3D animation that you would typically expect from Blender. Some clever computer graphics people spent time creating all the 3D characters in those movies, lovingly rigged them for animation, and rendered off the final film mix. To do this, they needed some pretty powerful computer programs known as 3D animation packages.
- 3. Blender is a 3D modeler, which can make characters for movies. • Blender has powerful texturing tools for painting the surface of the models. • Blender has powerful rigging and animation functions. The models you create can then be made to move around and act. • Blender has its own rendering engine and can be thought of as a complete lighting studio for a film. It also provides support for external renderers such as YafaRay and LuxRender. • Unlike other 3D packages, Blender has its own compositing module, so movie “shots” can be mixed. Blender also has a unique video sequence editor, making it possible to cut and edit movie strips without having to rely on extra third-party applications for the final editing stage of production.
- 4. Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline— modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. What is the Blender used for?
- 5. BLENDER HISTORY TIMELINE Figure 1–4 shows the history of development from which Blender was born. In a nutshell, Ton Roosendaal, the cofounder of animation studio NeoGeo, was in charge of its in-house software. However, the company hit financial problems, and in 2002, with investors beginning to pull assets, Ton took the radical measure of offering the Blender software as public domain, on the proviso that the community of Blender enthusiasts could raise 100,000 euros to relinquish the debts. Blender had obtained a loyal following, and the bid succeeded within a few weeks. As promised, Blender was released as open source under the GNU General Public License (GPL), and Ton has since dedicated himself to ongoing development of the software. Blender has grown because of a strong following of users and developers who tirelessly work on improving the application and its uses.
- 7. INTERFACE It will give you a hands-on tour of Blender. With an interface jam-packed full of buttons, Blender can be quite daunting at first. We will approach the interface slowly, and by the end of the chapter you should be able to navigate it well enough to make simple models from basics primitive shapes. Please note that I will be using some abbreviated terminology to simplify instructions. Where you see the terms LMB, MMB, and RMB, these refer to the left, middle, and right mouse buttons, respectively, with the middle mouse button usually doubling as the mouse wheel (MW). Note that you have to be able to click your MW to perform MMB actions. Figure 2–1 shows the layout of the mouse I am referring to.
- 10. Changing the View Blender has quite a list of controls for changing the view, which you will become familiar with over time. To get started, you should see which ones you think are the most useful. Try the following mouse manipulations in the 3D area: • MW roll: Position your mouse somewhere over the main 3D view and roll the MW up and down to zoom your view in and out. • Shift+MW roll: Rolling the MW while holding down Shift causes the window area to scroll vertically. • Ctrl+MW roll: Ctrl works like the Shift key, but for horizontal scroll. • MMB drag: Place your mouse over the middle of the screen, and this time hold the MMB/MW down. Without letting go of the MMB, move your mouse around. You should now be able to orient your point of view, trackball style. • Shift+MMB drag: Hold down Shift and then perform the same MMB drag as before. With Shift held down, you will be able to pan the view. Make sure you press the Shift key before the MMB, and that you hold it down for the duration of the mouse movement. • Ctrl+MW drag: Hold down the Ctrl key and then the MMB. Keeping both down, move the mouse vertically. This performs a zoom that is smoother than rolling the MW by itself.
- 11. VIEW MENU
- 12. P R O P E R T I E S V I E W These buttons may change depending on what is selected and the kind of task being performed. The thing to take note of is that the top presents a row of tabs that group the many available buttons into various types of tasks. Hovering your mouse over these tabs reveals headings for the kinds of settings each tab deals with; options include Render (camera icon), Scene, World, and Object. We will explore some of these in more depth in later chapters.
- 13. MULTIPLE-VIEW SETUP The numpad 7, numpad 1, and numpad 3 shortcut keys for the View menu we looked at earlier are not randomly placed. They form an L shape on the number pad of your keyboard, which corresponds to the onscreen positioning when making a classic four-planar view (top-left for top view, bottom-left for front view, and bottom-right for side view).