Blender 3D Basics: The complete novice's guide to 3D modeling and animation

You'll be able to look at an object and think of several ways to make it. You will perceive everything differently; as you walk down a street you will be imagining how you might model it or render it in Blender.

One thing to remember, there are no buttons in Blender that say "Don't touch".

As long as you back up your files and use the Ctrl+Z keys to undo any mistakes, not much is likely to go too wrong.

Now it's time to begin our discovery of Blender. Using Blender is as simple or complex as you want it to be.

Let's begin simply. To start, we will open Blender up and render out a scene. Rendering is like taking a picture in Blender. When you take a picture in real life, you have a camera, some light, and something or someone you are taking a picture of.

In a Blender scene, there is also a camera, lights, and something to render. When you render, Blender scans the scene from the camera's point of view. It notes which objects are where, and what lights are available. It then figures out how each object will be lit, what the surface of the object looks like, what part of the object the camera can see, how big it should appear to the camera, and other factors, and then Blender creates a picture. It's pretty amazing.

We'll dip our toe into Blender, just so you can see that using Blender is not difficult and that you can do it. Then we will get a little background on animation so you will understand what animators are trying to accomplish in Blender. Then using what you have learned, you'll be ready to learn more about Blender.

Go to http://www.blender.org/ to download Blender for free. There is a Download button on the main menu, which will direct you to where you can download Blender for your system. Blender runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, and FreeBSD. Follow the instructions and you should have Blender up and running quickly.

To use Blender, you need to first check that your machine has certain minimum system specifications, so that it is capable of running Blender. Here's where to find your system information:

The following is what Blender needs in order to be able to run:

Now that you have the latest version of Blender on your system, it's time to try it out.

Congratulations, you've now rendered your first scene in Blender. You can see the scene to be rendered in the preceding image. The cube is easy to guess. The dot surrounded by dashed lines is the light. The four-sided cone with a triangle on top is the camera, and there is a reference grid beneath the cube.

When the scene is rendered, as seen in the following screenshot, Blender shows you what the camera would see. The cube is colored gray because you haven't chosen a color. There is only one light in the scene and Blender calculates where the light is, and where the sides of the cube are. The light is not an object like a light bulb, so it is not seen in the rendered image, but its light is used to set the brightness of the scene.

While it's rendering, Blender figures out what portion of the light would bounce off of a particular side of the cube and into the camera. As some sides point away from the light, they appear darker. The sides facing toward the light appear to be brighter. Blender even does a trick that you don't see at all. Blender figures out which parts of the cube the camera does not see and to save itself from additional work, it doesn't render what cannot be seen.

Rendering this image was simple for you to do. Blender doesn't get any more difficult to use, you just learn more things to do with Blender. In future chapters, we will break down using Blender into easy-to-do steps.

Mac users, thank you for making changes to the interface of your Mac. Now you can use the standard Blender commands. This will this pay off by making Blendering much easier and fun. You can still access the Dashboard via the Mac menu bar.

When Blender renders a scene, it brings up a special render window over the 3D window. Pressing the Esc button closes this window, returning you to the 3D window. Ctrl+Q closes Blender 3D down completely. Congratulations! Everything else about learning Blender is just an elaboration on this.

Think of who your animation heroes are, and make a bookmarks folder in your web browser to store the addresses of websites about your favorite animators, or animations that you have seen. Now go online and look at some works that you know, whether it's Disney's Fantasia, South Park, or Plumiferos (Free Birds), which is the first feature length film made entirely in Blender (you can find out more at http://www.plumiferos.com/). Add a link to your folder whenever you find something you like. You can find quite a number of interesting animations by just looking around on the web. These are some that I found, Nina Paley's "Sita Sings the Blues" is a feature animation done by one person in Flash. It's pretty amazing. I also found "Snow-bo" by Vera Brosgol and Jenn Kluska, and "Kenya" on the Weebl's Stuff website. There are many great Blender animations at www.blenderartists.org.

Your list will be different from mine of course.

We are going to go into the past, back to when animation was young. We are going there because there are general issues that everyone encounters when trying to put graphics into motion. Early animations were simple, so it is easiest to see the fundamental animation techniques done and to see examples of where it wasn't done so we can see the difference.

Back then, like now, animators were under pressure; they had a short time to turn out a completed animation. They ran into issues such as what was required to tell a story believably, what kind of look to give it, how to make it easy to do, and how to get it done before their deadline. They also had to answer questions such as how to tell the story, how to get all the art work done, and how to photograph it with a camera. A lot of the answers they came up with are now universal.

First, we are going to look at a Felix the Cat animation called Felix Turns the Tide made a few years after World War I. It was a silent animation and cutting edge for its time, but pretty primitive by modern standards, as you can see in the following screenshot. From the thought balloon and text borrowed from newspaper comics you can see that animation hasn't come too far from its roots.

It's a good place to start because they had figured out the mechanics of making an animation, but they were just beginning to learn how to do animation well. In this book, you will learn both the mechanics of Blender animation, and how to do it well. It's a learning experience we will share with these pioneers—so we're in good company!

Felix Turns the Tide sure isn't Avatar, but it's surprising how well they used their limited tools and told a story. This was only six years after cel animation had been invented. Cel animation revolutionized early animation because it allowed you to put different parts of an animated frame on different layers, so you didn't have to redraw the entire scene every frame.

There are no right or wrong answers to these questions about the movies. The purpose is to get you to think about the question and come up with your own answers:

Animators are learning their craft and technology is advancing. Walt Disney has lost his main character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, to Universal Studios. Universal also hired away all of his animators except Ub Iwerks, Disney's star animator. This is a serious blow to Disney. So Disney is desperate and he needs something to stay in business. In 1928, Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks make their first Mickey Mouse animation, Plane Crazy. It introduces both Mickey and Minnie. But Walt cannot find a distributor for it, so it doesn't get released. His next Mickey Mouse movie, Steamboat Willie was the first American animation with sound, and that opened up the market for Mickey. For us, since Plane Crazy was made as a silent and retrofitted with sound, it shows how animators had perfected their skills in the period between 1922 and 1928, before the use of sound.

Animation has improved quite a bit in those six years. Now, the basic principles of animation were codified and used with good results. Instead of a static, stage-like establishing shot, we enter the scene following a cow, from blackness into a farmyard filled with activity. Let's look at some aspects of this improvement.

Now let's consider how animators improved their skills in eight years and how it changed animation:

The animation industry is mature. Felix ceased production in 1936. Disney released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in December of 1937 and was beginning production on Fantasia. With the popularity of Popeye, Fleischer Studios had become the number two animation company and was working on Gulliver's Travels. In 1938, Fleischer Studios did the Popeye cartoon Goonland. Goonland is a good example of the state of animation then.

Animation was mature by 1938. Studios were busy animating classics such as Snow White and Gulliver's Travels. Let's examine how they were using their talents:

You have already made up a library of your favorite animators. It's also good to study the masters; that's one great thing about the Internet, not only can you watch the animations, but you can pause them and scrub back and forth over the best parts, look at how they did it frame by frame, make sketches, and take notes. You see a lot of stuff that way that you would miss if you were just watching it play.

The following are a few recommendations:

Please remember that the times and values were different and watch their animation and not their attitudes.

It's time to meet Blender's great-great-grandfather. Originally, TV screens were used by computers for short-term data storage, but it wasn't long before people tried to connect the screens to computers especially for making graphics. We're going to look at videos of a few early efforts. The amazing thing about the first one is that one man came up with all of this in 1961. Ivan Sutherland put this system called Sketchpad together. It's the first real-time interactive computer graphics system; all others are descended from it, including Blender.

We saw the grandfather of all computer animation programs. Similar to early ink animations, it was all done with lines.

A few companies are experimenting with video and film quality computer animation. One of the first was a company called Information International, Inc. or Triple I. At the time, they were doing some of the best animation in the world, which led to them being one of the teams that made the original Tron. What's amazing looking back is how simple the graphics are.

That is quite an improvement over the work in Sketchpad, but still very stiff. Work on color, lighting, and textures was all being done for the first time. What is amazing is that this was a professional demo reel. Now, it might not even get you a job as an intern. Back then it was amazing.

In the first demo reel, the animation was pretty much objects floating in space. In the 1982 demo reel, the background becomes an integral part of the scene, and in the Adam Powers section we have a simple character animation, and he has to interact with objects in the scene. The team was the same people, with the addition of an Art Director. So we can see that using principles of graphic design is starting to make a difference.

Pixar was the first place that combined computer animation technology with traditional animation techniques. While the modeling and rendering were no better than anyone else at that time, the use of the 12 animation principles revolutionized computer animation. When it was introduced, other animators were in awe.

The Adventures of André and Wally B was a landmark film in a number of aspects. It took ten VAX-11/750 super-minicomputers and a Cray X-MP/48 supercomputer to render it out, and it was the first computer animation to use motion blur. But more importantly, it was the first computer animation to have animation principles used seriously. You can see the difference. This was such a breakthrough that the Association of Computing Machinery had John Lassiter write up a paper called Principles of Traditional Animation Applied to 3D Computer Animation for the July 1987 issue of Computer Graphics.

There is a lot of great animation to look at. You can never watch too much. If you have time, watch any Pixar shorts you can find. You might also want to check out the following films for a better idea of the range of animation that was happening back then. Do you see differences in the styles of the Americans, the Europeans, and the Japanese?

VintageCG on YouTube has a good collection of early computer animation. Some of the titles are:

Another one you might want to see is:

Your greater understanding of animation will increase your ability to create it.

So far, we've studied the roots of animation and of computers. It's good to see that the great started humbly, and see how things improved as they practiced. That gives us inspiration. It's the journey we are all on. The changes from Adam Powers to The Adventures of André and Wally B are impressive, as an animation professional moved in and showed the computer boys what using the principles of animation could do for their computer generated animations.

It might seem odd, but if you watch animated shows such as Futurama and American Dad, in outdoor scenes or ones with cars, planes, and rockets moving in them, you can tell that they were originally created in 3D then colored to match the rest of the 2D animation. One director told me that his 2D animated show is all done in 3D, but shot with a camera setting that flattens it out again. He finds it's faster to make it that way than with Flash or other 2D animation packages.

This is the market Blender was originally built for, back in the days when it was the in-house system at a Dutch advertising firm called NeoGeo. Blender is a good tool for local TV stations and advertisers, because it can do a lot quickly and deliver quality results at a price that even the smallest TV station's manager will appreciate. Networks such as Azteca America have used Blender at some of their studios. Blender is good for schools and universities as well as personal video projects.

Although there are few films done in Blender, shorts such as Sintel show that Blender has the capacity to do it. Hollywood has been known to use Blender for pre-visualizing a movie before it's made, to figure out how the movie will look when they make it.

This is the hot new trend in films. You need to have two cameras render the same scene from slightly different locations, just like your eyes are slightly apart. But the cameras have to work in sync with each other. Think of how your eyes shift if they were to go from threading a needle to looking at mountains in the distance. Blender can do this as well as any other 3D animation package.

Blender is good for rendering out complete animations or for making graphics for use in Flash.

Blender has its own Game Engine. So it's good for making your own games and showing what you can do. You can also export Blender files for use as assets with other game engines such as Ogre, Unity, and CrystalSpace. You can find out more at sites such as www.blenderartists.org.

The Blender Game Engine and Blender's physics packages make it possible to make your own flight and driving simulators.

Nowadays we are seeing digital signs almost everywhere, from HD monitors in McDonalds to the huge signs in Las Vegas. With user-selectable resolution, you can make animations in Blender to whatever size you need, for whatever use. The files can then be uploaded to the Web and distributed to displays all over. This is a quickly growing market for advertising companies.

Because the Python language allows using a scientific data set, anything from weather to a rocket to medial simulations can be animated. NASA uses Blender at some of its locations.

With animation for the legal system, the models are often simple though realistic proportions. The clients are paying for accuracy, not fancy graphics. Blender's physics engine can help you make realistic animations. You can make car crashes, track bullets, and help when a crime comes to trial. It's an in-demand way to use your animation talents.

Clients of a multi-million dollar project want to see what they are getting before they spend their money. This is a very specialized use of Blender and other 3D animation systems. You can give your clients either a high resolution video walkthrough or use the game engine to make it interactive. You could even use it to plan the remodeling of your basement.

Blender can output a virtual reality .X3D file to create virtual reality on the Web that can be used interactively on most browsers.

The set behind the TV personality may not exist at all, it might be a set modeled and rendered in Blender.

The Blender game engine can be used, or Blender can provide graphics for Flash or websites.

For anything from dinosaurs to the moons of Saturn, 3D is probably the best way to demonstrate what can't be seen directly. This can be used to show others the ideas in your head and the visions you see, taking them to places that are too small, too large, or too dangerous to visit in reality.

If you do good work and can demonstrate it, many employers don't care what software you use. I know of one animator who perfected his Blender skills while serving in Iraq. He took what he did to the big studios and soon he was working on major Hollywood films.

Blender can be used to design and create real objects. Real copies can be made using 3D printers when you export your Blender files in an STL format.