Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Website: www.blender.org Price: Free! Current version: 2.91.2
Blurb: “Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3Dpipeline—modelling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline. “
Recommended reading: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/
Installation
After a quick discussion on our Telegram group this year, it seems our readers would like some Blender in the magazine.
Blender works great on Ubuntu, even on potato laptops, but I would urge you to invest in memory. (Also realise that applications that create scratch files can shorten the lifespan of SSD’s) If you have a graphics card, even better!
No doubt you installed Blender and run it and realised it looks like the cockpit of a jumbo jet. Hey, it confused the living barnacles out of me the fist time I looked at it too. What do all these buttons do? Have no fear, here at FCM we will hold you hand as we take you around this awesome open source program. Blender is very versatile, BUT! You need to know what you are doing before it gets there. The learning curve is not too steep, but it it is steep, if you have never worked with any 3D modelling software before.
Before we get to the buttons, however, I would like you to take a gander at the status bar (above). You will see little mouse icons. Move the mouse to the different sections on the page and keep your eye on the icons. See how they change? This is a quick way to see what-is-what in each pane. Now repeat that action and hold down the ctrl or shift or alt keys.
The developers have actually gone as far as to set up defaults for you to use in your specific use case. At the top of the screen, you will see tabs labelled: “modelling”, “sculpting” or “animation” and so on. This will optimize the layout so you can get on with your work without having to reconfigure it to do something else. Nothing is set in stone though, you can move panels and panes and add or remove them without much difficulty. While you are perusing the layouts, did you notice the small arrows on the edges of the panes? These expand to give you other tools or options not immediately available on the toolbar. For instance, In the layout tab (The one you will most likely start in) the left arrow will let you will see tools that allow you to manipulate what is in front of you, like scaling or moving. (The right arrow is more about viewport options.) If you are a keyboard jockey, and prefer short-cut keys, each of these have a key assigned to them, so best you familiarize yourself with them early on. You may not need a pilot’s license to drive this thing, but it could only help. *wink* Please play with the layouts and moving panels and click on things to expand them. Playing around in this way will actually teach you a great deal. This will of course not make you and animator or modeller, but every journey starts with one step, or so they say. (In our case it starts with one click, no?) Don’t worry, you are not going to break it!
For us on the outside ( non-graphic artists ) there is still a lot of joy to be had from this program so put a little effort in, learning the interface as it pays a lot of dividends. These pop out menu’s are not the only menu’s available, there are also radial menu’s. These are not my favourite, as they are not the easiest to navigate. There is only one option, practice, practice, practice.
A quick note on menu’s. Some menu’s will change, depending on which object you have selected. As an example, the properties vertical menu to the right. It will display different icons if you click on the canvas to when you click on an object, so you need to put these patterns in your brain, so that you don’t look for a property when you inadvertently click on the background. I know this all sounds like a mouthful, but you have the whole month to digest it before we continue in the next issue. Remember tool tips are handy. We, and by extension you, (yes, please be hands-on) will be using this menu a lot if you plan to pursue making the most of this application. Let us look at the menu now.
I want to draw your attention to the spacing between the menu items, this is how things are grouped. The spanner and the screwdriver are apart from the rest. Further down the list you will see a space between world properties and object properties. See if you can find the next one. If your screen real estate is on the small side, know that at any time you can press CTRL+SPACE to enlarge, really maximize the pane, like pressing F11 in your browser. To restore the pane to its original size, simply press that same key combination. Try it out now. These buttons refer to the selected scene. You can have more than one (keep that in mind), but we will get to that later. I don’t want to confuse you at this early stage. You are welcome to see if you can figure out what these buttons all are, but for now, I want you to know what they are only. Mouse over will provide tooltips, as they are confusing. I say this because the printer icon is output and the camera screen is rendering.
Finally, lets look at out main work area for now. Say “Lights, camera, action!” with me. No seriously, say it. Now find the light, camera and action. Confused? In your “Scene collection” to the right, you will see a light, a camera and a cube. Clicking on each of these will highlight the corresponding item in the main screen.
Light:
Camera:
Action:
So why am I referring to the grey cube as action? Well, I am not. We have a combination here. A “spawn point” if you will, a plane and a cube. The “spawn point” is the 3D cursor in blender-speak. Try to click on it and move it. This is what I mean by there is a learning curve, things don’t just happen – and that is that way for a reason.
I want you to click on the 3D cursor again and this time I want you to roll your mouse wheel up and down, while keeping your eye on the 3d cursor in relation to the cube or “mesh”. If it has not moved, it is at the “world origin”. You will need to start learning the lingo. Wait, there’s a lingo? I’m afraid so. Luckily it is very simple.
Tip: if you see the bar at the bottom moving by itself, you’ve hit the space bar. To stop it, simply hit the space bar again. This is for animation. We will get to that much later.
That’s it for this issue, be sure to pick up where we left off in the next issue of FCM!
If you cant wait, I recommend looking here: https://blender-tutorials.com/
Do you have any comments? Let us know at misc@fullcirclemagazine.org