Chapter 1. Introducing Blender and Animation
Welcome! It's a good guess that you are interested in learning how to create 3D animations or model 3D objects, maybe for use in games or 3D printing. You've chosen Blender 3D and you want to learn how to use it. This book is a good choice for learning Blender 3D. We did research on what hurdles new users faced and what were their frustrations with other training methods. So we will go step-by-step, learning how to use Blender comfortably to create animations, and do modeling, lighting, camera work, and much more. We will start out with simple steps and get comfortable at using the Blender interface, making and animating a rowboat and a sloop, and creating our own private island as shown in the following screenshot:
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- A small introduction to Blender.
- Installing Blender and giving it a quick test.
- The top ten reasons to enjoy Blender 3D
- General animation and a glance at a few videos. The videos give us a quick introduction to animation.
- A few basic principles of animation.
- Watching some early computer graphics on how computer animators learned animation.
- Uses of 3D.
- The inner workings of Blender.
