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

The following is a screenshot made using Blender:

The world of Blender is not an animated world as seen in films like Big Buck Bunny as shown previously, or Sintel that was made in Blender. It's the amazing community of people all over the world who use Blender. Artists, programmers, professionals, amateurs, teens, and retirees all use Blender and you are one of the newest members of our community.

One thing that makes this community remarkable is the concept that Blender is free, you pay for it by helping out the Blender community. There are many ways to give back. You can recommend Blender to your friends; have fun helping other Blender users at websites such as www.blenderartists.org by critiquing their works or passing along tips that you have learned. Blender is open source. Once you have mastered Blender, you can help create new functions for Blender itself or work with the Blender foundation team to make new cutting edge examples of what Blender can do, such as Sintel. There are as many ways to help as there are Blender users and most important, helping others helps you as a Blender user. Blender is not a solo sport, so join in.

As Sintel, shown in the following screenshot, learned about her little Dragon, you will be learning a lot about how to use Blender. We will start out with some quick exercises to introduce you to the basics, and as you progress, you will be able to do more and more. As you study and practice, your hands will learn the Blender commands, freeing your mind to let it concentrate on modeling, animation, lights, and camera.

This book is about using Blender 3D, but there is more to animation than knowing which buttons to push while using Blender. Animators who are skilled at using the software, but do not have a broader understanding of animation, do not get the full use of the tools. They don't understand the culture or the history of animation or how animation principles have been used by masters such as Ub Iwerks, Chuck Jones, and Hayao Miyazaki, and therefore cannot profit from them.

So, in this chapter, we will look at animation in general, and then computer animation specifically. After that, we will get a bit closer and apply what we have learned to Blender. As you go through this book, you'll start by making some simple animations, moving the lights and camera in Blender. Once you are confident with this, you'll study the fundamentals of modeling and complete a simple modeling and animation project; and finally, you will work on a more complex scene to expand your skills and get comfortable with the whole Blender production cycle.

There are many excellent books showing how to animate. In this book, we will focus on Blender and include pointers about animation that will help you educate yourself about animation in general and get the most from Blender.

Repetition is important when learning a skill. It takes repeated usage before your arms know what to do when the mind says "Scale this box." So be patient with yourself. Play, learn, and have fun.

Although Blender is very powerful and has a lot of features, it's easy to get started using it. Blender has a default scene all set up for you to render.

First, start your copy of Blender. You can either click on the Blender.exe icon in the directory that you have installed it in, or use a shortcut if you have created one. Blender will even run from a data stick, so you don't need to have it installed on a particular computer.

When you've started it, you should see something like the following screen, but you will also see a splash screen (depending on the version of Blender installed), consisting of an attractive image made in Blender and some links.

Move the mouse over the big central window. Click the mouse to remove the splash screen.

Then, if you are running Windows or Linux, press the F12 button on your keyboard.

If you have a Mac, click on where it says Render to the left, above the large 3D View window. Select Render Image from the drop-down menu. This is because Macs often have the F1-F12 function keys already mapped to specific functions.

The following are the changes you should make to optimize your Mac for Blender. When you have made these changes, you will be able to use Blender in the same manner as Windows and Linux users, and you will be able to press the F12 button to start rendering:

What just happened?

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.

Now let's close Blender and study some basics of animation:

We all have our reasons for wanting to use Blender. My initial reason was that I wanted to teach a class on 3D animation at my local parks and recreation center. I needed a 3D system that would fit the budget and that students could take home to use. Since then, I've also used it professionally, creating animations for an airline, a national football league team, banks, and more. I made the first animated entry ever into the Film in 48 Hours contest with Blender and one Blender animation of mine was also accepted into the Ozark Foothills Film Festival. So you never know how Blender will come in handy.

Here are the top 10 reasons to enjoy using Blender 3D: