Blender For Dummies

DC ACM/SIGGRAPH Blender Seminars – 19 March

Jason — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:03:24 +0000

The DC chapter of ACM/SIGGRAPH is holding a set of Professional Development Seminars at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. this month, from March 18-20. As part of this, I will be teaching two seminars on the 19th: a Blender Basics course in the morning and an Advanced Blender course in the afternoon. Registration is open now. You can find out more information on the DC ACM/SIGGRAPH website, including a brochure PDF. Should be a lot of fun. Of course, if you have any questions, you’re free to ask here.

Book Signing (My First Ever!)

Jason — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:53:13 +0000

So of all the weird things to happen, I’m actually having a book signing. How’s that for crazy? It’s going to be tomorrow, 19 June from 6-8 PM in the Barnes and Noble at Chesterfield Town Center, just south of Richmond, VA. If you’re in the area (or even if you aren’t!), come on out. You can hang out, ask questions, or point and laugh from a distance. It should be good fun.

Hope to see you there!

Connecticut Film Festival

Jason — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:29:59 +0000

The Connecticut Film Festival is taking place this week from June 2-7 in Danbury, Connectictut. The festival is pretty sweet, featuring not only live-action film, but also animation and interactive media like video games. I’ll be giving a presentation on Friday the 5th on producing animations with Blender just before a presentation by fellow Blenderhead and badass animator, Bassam Kurdali. And on the 6th, we’ll both be part of a panel called the ABCs of CGI. If you’re in the area, come on out and partake in the funstuffs!

New Feature! Bone Sketching

Jason — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:51:48 +0000

Taking a quick moment with this tutorial to give a preview and explanation for a totally awesome new feature in Blender 2.49, which should be released soon. There is a release candidate for Blender 2.49 available on blender.org, so you’ll have to download that to follow along with this tutorial. The feature I’m talking about is Etch-a-ton, which allows sketch-based rigging. It’s an incredibly powerful tool that’s certain to help speed up and simplify the process of rigging in Blender. This tutorial walks you through the basics of how to use it. Of course, there’s a lot more to this tool that what I can show in 10 minutes, but this should plenty to get you started. As with before, you can download this tutorial directly to your computer and it has also been uploaded to YouTube and Vimeo. Have fun!

bone_sketching.blend
bone_sketching.mp4 (65MB)

Adding Basic Materials to an Eye

Jason — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 07:10:47 +0000

This is an extension to the Modeling an Eye tutorial in Chapter 5. Here I show you how to use material indices to to rough out some of the basic materials on the eye, including the lens, iris, and pupil. There’s a touch on 3-point lighting here, but that’s more of a topic for another tutorial. As with the other tutorials, I’ve uploaded this one to both YouTube and Vimeo… and there’s a link below to directly download the .mp4 file for your own personal use. Enjoy!

eye_material.blend
eye_material.mp4 (38MB)

Modeling an Eye

Jason — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 06:47:52 +0000

This is a quick tutorial on using a UV Sphere to model an eye. This is the basic eye that I typically always start my character models with. It’s a good starting point and it renders quite nicely. You can watch the tutorial in the player below and there’s a link at the bottom of this post if you’d like to download the tutorial for yourself. This tutorial is also available on YouTube and Vimeo.

Check out the Adding Basic Materials on an Eye tutorial in Chapter 7 to see how to get this model ready for render.

eye_model.blend
eye_model.mp4 (50MB)

Cover Graphic

Jason — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:45:49 +0000

Yes, this is actually the .blend file I used to create the image on the cover of this book. Of course, you should bear in mind the fact that I cheated quite a lot and the rig for this character is far from optimized. However, that said, he has some decent texturing and I’m actually a pretty big fan of his hair. Not only that, but there’s a bare-bones character in this file as well that might be a little bit more versatile than Stickman. Not only that, but now you can see what a “production” .blend file looks like. Yeah… it’s a bit of a mess.

Either way, I had a ton of fun making this image. Hopefully you can enjoy it just as much as I have.

Wheeeeeeee!

Files:

cover.blend (8.4 MB)

Visualizing Z-depth

Jason — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:40:19 +0000

This is a simple node network to show you a visual representation of the Z-depth in this scene. Render (F12) to see what it looks like.

Files:

zdepth.blend

Simple Compositing Exercise

Jason — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:39:24 +0000

These are the files for the example in Chapter 15 on compositing. Note that the Suzanne head is on Layer 1 and the Cube is on Layer 2. This should help you in setting up your render layers.

If you followed the steps in Chapter 15, your .blend file should look something like simplecomp-end.blend. If you render (F12) this scene, it should look fine. Then when you’re in the Node Compositor, left-clicking each of the Viewer nodes will show what is on each Render Layer node.

Cool, huh?

Files:

Fields and Collisions

Jason — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:36:07 +0000

This setup is similar to the one in Figure 13-4. There’s an Empty producing a fairly massive wind force that’s pushing the particles towards a giant plane. That plane is configured to act as a collision object, so the particles bounce off of it and then get blown back around it by the wind. Put your mouse cursor in the 3D View and press Alt+A to watch it in action.

Files:

wind_collision.blend