Introducing Blender

Why Blender? It’s free It’s powerful It’s small A large and growing community of Blender users http://www.blender.org

How to learn Blender? Learn the interface first Read user’s guide http://www.blender.org/education-help/tutorials/tutorial-folder/blender-user-interface-tutorial/ http://www.blender.org/education-help/video-tutorials/getting-started/ Read user’s guide http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Manual Video tutorials http://www.blender.org/education-help/video-tutorials/ Lots of tutorials at http://www.blender.org/education-help/tutorials/

Overview Interface Windows Views Objects Camera Lighting Rendering Animation

Things to Have Three button mouse (with middle scroll) Keyboard with a number pad Fast CPU for rendering final movie Good graphics card when building models None of these are required, but life is better with them

Basic Interface Menus A Cube Camera Window Type Light Settings Layers

Before Anything Else... Saving/Opening Files is not intuitive Make sure you save often! backups blender meltdowns Make sure you press ‘Enter’! Blender files can be large

Splitting the Screen Often, it’s a good idea to split the screen Allows multiple views of the same object Right-click on a window divider to: split screen join screens back together Caution: the screen that’s split depends on where the mouse came from!

Different Views Can view from the: Front – NumPad1 Side – NumPad3 Top – NumPad7 Camera – NumPad 0 Can be in orthographic or perspective mode! NumPad 5 toggles Recommendation: stay in orthographic! Can also use the ‘view’ menu

Different Views Ability to zoom in/out: Ability to ‘look around’ Use middle mouse scroller NumPad +/- works as well Ability to ‘look around’ drag with middle mouse button takes you out of x/y/z axis may want to reset view when done Shift-middle-drag translates screen Different Shading modes Wireframe/Shaded (use ‘z’ key) Apply lighting model (use SHIFT-z)

Object and Edit Mode Object mode: the operations affect the selected object Editor mode: the operations affect the selected vertices, lines, or triangles.

Modes of an Object Can be selected or non- selected right-click on object to select it If selected, changes affect this object! Copy object with CTRL-D or ALT-D

Editing an Object A selected object can be in edit mode or non-edit mode TAB toggles between these modes Can still use the menus Vertices can be selected or not selected (yellow are selected) Object can be deleted by selecting it, then pressing ‘x’ key

Adding Objects to the Scene Everything starts with the space bar! From this menu, you can: Add meshes (spheres, cubes, cones, etc) Add lights Transform objects (rotate/scale/translate) Edit objects (change vertex coordinates) Several other common options

Importing Models Blender has its own 3D model format You can import other 3D models into Blender E.g. .3ds, .obj, etc. Blender 3D model repository:  http://www.e2-productions.com/bmr Another web site of 3D Blender models:  http://www.katorlegaz.com/3d_models/index.php

Basic Transformations Standard Operations: rotate – ‘r’ key scale – ‘s’ key grab (translate) – ‘g’ key skew – press ‘s’ key, then middle mouse drag Click mouse when finished

Camera in computer graphics Computer graphics uses the pinhole camera model This results in perfectly sharp images No depth of field or motion blur Real cameras use lenses with variable aperture sizes This causes depth-of-field: out-of-focus objects appear blurry

Depth of field Depth of view is an important part of the storytelling process Direct viewer’s eyes to a certain area of the scene Depth of view can be faked in CG, but needs extra work

Motion Blur Camera in computer graphics does not generate motion blur either Again, it can be faked in CG but performance may suffer

Lighting Overview Light types Volumetric lighting Light Texturing Lamp Spot Sun Volumetric lighting Light Texturing Radiosity

Basic Lighting All scenes must have at least one light source Add a light using spacebar Basic Light Types Lamp Spot Sun

World Settings Make sure Shading button is pressed Then select World button Can adjust Background Color Fog (based off of background color) Stars

Rendering your Work Press F12 or render button Press F11 to return to scene editor Remember, rendering size depends on your initial settings

Initial Settings This is the directory your rendered animation will be stored in Type in name of file to generate Leave the rest alone

(good for quick previews) Initial Settings Enable Shadows Render the image Enable Raytracing Enable Radiosity Full-scene Anti-aliasing Percent of full render (good for quick previews) Motion blur (powerful, but very expensive)

Animation Animation is based off of keyframes Basic idea: Lock model into place in one frame Increase the frame number Lock model again Let Blender interpolate movement Use the ‘i’ key to do this Usually, you have to tweak by editing the splines by hand

Start rendering the animation Initial Settings Start rendering the animation Used for plugins Play the animation (once it’s rendered) Starting and Ending frame numbers

Initial Settings Pixels wide/high Aspect ratio File format Frames per second (SVideo = 30, Movies = 24) Note: Once done, you may want to save these as the default by using CTRL-U

Game engine Blender uses a game engine called “Bullet” Can simulate simple rigid body dynamics You can create a simple video game with Blender

Words of Advice Making simple movies isn’t hard, but it takes a long time Golden Rule of blender “Keep one hand on the keyboard and one hand on your mouse”

Readings Blender interface http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/PartI/Interface