For Dummies Blender, 2nd Edition
Contents
1. Huet ict Sr Fr IEEE EGESPR SE clt 11 2 Part I Wrapping Your Brain Around Blender Making Open Movies and Games One cool thing about the programmers who write Blender is that many of them also use the program regularly They re writing code not just because they re told to do it but also because they want to improve Blender for their own purposes Part of this motivation has to do with Blender s open source nature but it also has to do with Blender s history as an in house tool built on direct artist input and sometimes written by the artists themselves Seeking to get even more of this direct artist feedback to developers the Blender Foundation launched Project Orange in 2005 The project s purpose was to create an animated short movie using open source tools primar ily Blender A small team of artists was assembled in Amsterdam in the Netherlands and roughly seven months later Elephants Dream premiered and was released as the first open movie meaning that not only was it cre ated by using open source tools but all the production files 3D models scenes character rigs and so on were also released under a permissive and open Creative Commons Attribution license If you don t like Elephants Dream you re free to change it to your liking or use the files for something else entirely How many movies give you that luxury You can see the film and all the production files at www elephantsdream org Du2. work on the program Blender can be improved by programmers all over the world Because of these strengths Blender is an ideal program for small animation companies freelance 3D artists independent filmmakers students beginning to learn about 3D computer graphics and dedicated computer graphics hobbyists Blender like many other 3D computer graphics applications has had a reputation for being difficult for new users to understand At the same time however Blender is also known for allowing experienced users to bring their ideas to life quickly Fortunately with the help of this book and the recent improvements introduced in the latest version of Blender that gap is becom ing much easier to bridge Discovering Blender s Beginnings The Blender you know and love today wasn t always free and open source Blender is pretty unique in that it s one of the few software applications that was liberated from proprietary control with the help of its user community Originally Blender was an internal production tool for an award winning Dutch animation company called NeoGeo founded in the late 1990s by Blender s original and still lead developer Ton Roosendaal As interest in Blender grew Ton spun off anew company Not a Number NaN to market and sell Blender Sadly NaN was forced to shut its doors in 2002 despite Blender s growing popularity Ironically this is where the story starts to get exciting IEEE Figure
3. 1 1 Blender through the years Blender 1 8 top left Blender 2 46 top right and the major changes apparent in the Blender of today bottom aaa Chapter 1 Discovering Blender Even though NaN went under Blender had developed quite a strong com munity which was eager to find a way to keep its beloved little program from becoming lost and abandoned In July 2002 Ton established a nonprofit orga nization called the Blender Foundation and arranged a deal with the original NaN investors to release Blender s source to the Blender Foundation The price tag was set at 100 000 which at the time was about 100 000 Initial estimations were that it would take as long as six months to one year to raise the necessary funds Amazingly the community was able to raise that money in a mere seven weeks Because of the Blender community s passion and willingness to put its money where its metaphorical mouth was Blender was released under the GNU General Public License on October 13 2002 With the source in the com munity s hands Blender had an avalanche of development and new features added to it in a very short time Eight years later the Blender community is larger and stronger than ever and Blender is a powerful modern piece of software competitive in terms of quality with similar software costing thou sands of dollars Not too shabby Figure 1 1 shows screenshots of Blender from its early days to the Blender of today
4. advantage of this feature follow these steps 1 Shift left click one of the corner widgets in an area and drag your mouse cursor away from it This step duplicates the area you clicked in and creates a new Blender window to contain it You can also achieve this effect from the menus in the header region of some editors by choosing View Duplicate Area into New Window 2 Close the additional Blender window by clicking the close button that your operating system adds to the border of the window All editors in Blender areas have a horizontal region called the header run ning along either the top or bottom of the editor The header usually features specialized menus or buttons that are specific to the editor you re using Here are some ways you can customize the header Y Hide the header If you drag the seam all the way to the area border then the header becomes hidden leaving only a small plus icon in the corner of the area If the header is at the bottom of the editor the plus icon appears at the bottom right If the header appears at the top it s at the top left Left click this icon and the header reappears Change the location of the header You can also change the location of the header to either the top or bottom of the editor it belongs to To do so right click the header and choose Flip to Top or Bottom depending on where your header currently is 17 8 Part I Wrapping Your Brain Around Blender Drm F
5. or right to split the area vertically Dragging it up or down splits the area horizontally As you drag your mouse the areas update in real time so that you can see the result of the split while you re working To cancel the operation right click or press Esc Chapter 1 Discovering Blender If you want to remove an area the process is similar Rather than splitting an area in two you re joining two areas together So instead of left clicking the corner widget and dragging your mouse cursor away from the area border drag it toward the border of the area you want to join with This action dark ens the area your mouse is in and draws an arrow to indicate which area you want to remove Figure 1 5 shows the basic steps for splitting and joining areas Duplicating an area to a new window In addition to the new way of splitting and joining areas the Blender devel opers have also introduced a brand new feature in the 2 5 series via corner widgets You now have the ability to take any area and duplicate it to a new Blender window You can move that window to a separate monitor if you have one or it can overlap your original Blender window And within this new Blender window you can split the duplicated area into additional ones as you like This area duplication feature is a slight violation of Blender s non overlapping principles but the benefits it provides for users with multiple computer screens make it very worthwhile To take
6. Chapter 1 Discovering Blender In This Chapter Figuring out what Blender is and what it s used for Understanding how the current version of Blender is influenced by its past Getting familiar with the Blender interface n the world of 3D modeling and animation software programs are usu ally expensive like thousands of dollars and maybe an arm expensive And there are some valid reasons for that cost Software companies spend millions of dollars and countless hours developing these programs And the large production companies that buy these programs for their staff make enough money to afford the high cost or they hire programmers and write their own in house software But what about you and me the little guys We are the ambitious dreamers with big ideas high motivation and tight budgets How can we bring our ideas to life and our stories to screen even if only on our own computer mon itors Granted we could shell out the cash and hopefully keep our arms for the expensive programs that the pros use But even then animation is a highly collaborative art and it s difficult to produce anything in a reasonable amount of time without some help We need quality software and a strong community to work grow and evolve with Fortunately Blender can provide us with both of these things This chapter is an introduction to Blender its background and its interface Getting to Know Blender Blender is a free and open source 3D
7. e to the success of Orange the Blender Institute was established in 2007 for the expressed purpose of having a permanent space to create open proj ects as well as provide the service of training people in Blender The first open project from the Blender Institute was Project Peach which follow ing the model of Orange assembled a team of artists who produced a short comedic animation called Big Buck Bunny Like Elephants Dream all produc tion files for the Peach project were released under an open license You can access them at www bigbuckbunny org Not being inclined to rest on its laurels the Blender Institute launched Project Apricot as the team creating Big Buck Bunny was wrapping up its production Apricot was a project similar to Orange and Peach but rather than create an animated movie the goal here was to create a video game The result of this was Yo Frankie a game based on Frankie the leader squir rel character from the Big Buck Bunny project And of course all the content is freely available at the Yo Frankie Web site www yofrankie org undera permissive Creative Commons license With the completion of each project the functionality and stability of Blender increased by a large degree Orange brought improved animation tools basic hair and a node based compositor Peach provided enhanced particles for better hair and fur optimizations for large scenes improved rendering and even better animation and rigging tools A
8. igure 1 5 Creating a new area and then removing that area ESS ae Create a new area Remove an area Maximizing an area When working in Blender you also occasionally need to maximize an area Maximizing an area is particularly useful when you re working on a model or scene and you just want to get all the other areas out of your way so that you can use as much screen real estate as possible To maximize any area hover your mouse cursor over it and press Shift spacebar You can toggle back to the tiled screen layout by pressing Shift spacebar again These options are available in almost all editor types by choosing View Toggle Full Screen from that editor s header or by right clicking the header and choosing Maximize Area from the menu that appears If the area is already maximized then the menu item will say Tile Area
9. modeling and animation suite Yikes What a mouthful huh Put simply Blender is a computer graphics program that allows you to produce high quality still images and animations using three dimensional geometry If you ve seen an animated feature film or watched a television show where they go behind the scenes and explain how they made an actor look like he s being chased by a giant monster although 10 Part I Wrapping Your Brain Around Blender MBER we a he s really just standing in a big green room you ve seen what can be done with 3D computer graphics In the right hands Blender is capable of produc ing this kind of work With a little patience and dedication your hands can be the right hands One thing that makes Blender different and special compared to other com parable 3D software is the fact that it is free and open source Being free and open source means that not only can you go to the Blender Web site www blender org and download the entire program right now without paying anything but you can also freely download the source or the code that makes up the program For most programs the source code is a heavily guarded and highly protected secret that only certain people mostly programmers hired by the company that distributes the program can see and modify Because it s open source anybody can see Blender s source code and make changes to it The benefit is that instead of having a small group of paid programmers
10. n the Duplicating an area to a new window section Kesizing an area You can modify and change all the areas in a Blender window in the same way Change the size of an area by left clicking the border between two areas and dragging it to a new position This method increases the size of one area while reducing the size of those that adjoin it If you have only one area in your Blender window it s exactly the same size as that window To resize it you need to either adjust the size of its parent Blender window or split a new area into that space Splitting and removing areas While working in Blender it s pretty common that the default layout isn t quite what you need to work efficiently Sometimes you may need an additional 3D View or you may want to see the UV Image Editor in addition to the 3D View To create either of these layout changes you need to split an existing area into two Splitting a new area doesn t work like it used to in previous versions of Blender In earlier versions you d split or join areas by right clicking the border and choosing an option from a pop up menu As of Blender 2 5 a new system uses the corners at the bottom left and top right of any area These corner widgets are marked as a triangular region indicated by diagonal lines To split any area into two use the following steps 1 Left click one of the corner widgets and drag your mouse cursor away from the area s border 2 Drag your mouse cursor left
11. pekeys blend f Manual f amp switchdir blend fi Blender Website FR twobones biend User Community FR stickman blend fib Python API Reference votis Recover Last Session Ve F 6 0 1 3 La 1 Mem 5 92H 0 10M Gu o v sue oya Gaa O B RAP Ploo E HH OOS Chapter 1 Discovering Blender 15 An interface that stays out of your way The first thing to understand about Blender s interface is its basic organiza tion Figure 1 3 displays a single Blender window Each Blender window can consist of one or more areas that you can split resize and join at will In nearly all cases an area defines the space of an editor such as the 3D View where you actually make changes and modifications to your 3D scene Each editor can include one or more regions that contain additional features or tools for using that editor An example of a region that all editors have is a header region at the top or bottom of the editor that typically includes menus and buttons to give you access to features in that editor Knowing this organizational structure the next important thing to know is that Blender is designed to be as nonblocking and nonmodal as possible Areas in Blender never overlap one another nonblocking and using one feature of Blender typically won t restrict you from using any of the others nonmodal As an example in most software if you want to open a new file or save your project a file browser dialog po
12. pricot revitalized Blender s internal game engine which extended to better real time visuals when modeling and animating in Blender Chapter 1 Discovering Blender 13 And even as I wrote parts of this second edition of Blender For Dummies artists at the Blender Institute were finishing up the latest open project Project Durian A durian is a smelly Asian fruit with an exotic taste Durian is another short movie project named Sintel with the lofty goals of making Blender 2 5 production ready and adding features for epic scenes including highly detailed sculpting large environments and highly detailed high reso lution renders You can see the film and access all the Durian project files at www sintel org I ve also included a copy of Sintel on the book s compan ion DVD and the color insert of this book has still images from a few of the open movie projects All these projects continue to exhibit the strength of the Blender community Each of them are financed in a large part by DVD presales from users who understand that regardless of the project s final product great improvements to Blender are the result and everyone benefits from that Getting to Know the Interface Probably one of the most daunting aspects of Blender for newcomers and longtime 3D professionals alike has been its unique and somewhat peculiar interface It s arguably the most controversial feature Blender has In fact at one time merely calling the inte
13. ps up This dialog is an overlap ping window that not only blocks things behind it from view but usually also prevents you from making any changes to your file This setup isn t the case with Blender In Blender the file browser is an editor just like any other and it makes perfect sense to be able to make a couple of tweaks to your scene before hitting the Save button Figure 1 4 shows what it might look like to have a file browser open while you make tweaks aa Figure 1 4 Doing those last couple of tweaks before finally sav ing Model credit Blender Foundation Sintel b 6 Part I Wrapping Your Brain Around Blender MBER et a At first working in a nonblocking nonmodal interface may seem to be really restrictive How do you see different types of editors Can you see them at the same time Everything looks like it s nailed in place so is it even possible to change anything Fortunately all these things are possible and you get the benefit of never having your view of one area obstructed by another Having an unobstructed workspace is a great way to be able to see at a glance what s going on in your file Furthermore as of the Blender 2 5 development series if you absolutely need multiple windows that can overlap you can have them For example you might have two computer monitors that are different sizes and you d like a full sized Blender window in each I show you how to do task later in this chapter i
14. rface a feature would raise the blood pres sure of some of you who tried using Blender in the past but gave up in frus tration when it did not behave as expected Although the interface wasn t the primary focus the interface updates to Blender added in the 2 5 series of releases have made great strides toward alleviating that frustration As a small example when you first launch Blender the splash image that appears is more functional now providing you with quick links to online documentation as well as a list of recently opened files Figure 1 2 shows the splash image you re presented with when you start Blender for the first time If you click anywhere other than the links provided by the splash image the splash image goes away and you re greeted with Blender s default scene as shown in Figure 1 3 If you re looking at the interface for the first time you may think it appears pretty daunting However the purpose of this book is to help you get the hang of Blender explaining some of the design decisions in the interface and ultimately allowing you to be productive Who knows you might even start to like it and wonder why other programs don t work this way 4 Part I Wrapping Your Brain Around Blender HEIEENEESEEESNEN Figure 1 2 The new and improved Blender splash image A Figure 1 3 The default Blender interface E E Blender 2 5 Beta Donations R stickman blend Release Log FR sha
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