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2 You can now find video tutorials for Blender Basics on line for each chapter. Visit: Look for the video link on the page to take you to the YouTube channel. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 2004, 2006, 2009, 2011, 2017 fifth edition by James Chronister. This document may be reproduced in whole or in part without permission from the author. Feel free to use this manual for any and all educational applications. I enjoy s from other educators, so please let me know how you re using the book. You may not bundle this tutorial with any software or documentation that is intended for commercial applications (marketing for a profit) without expressed written approval from the author. Inquiries and comments can be directed to jchronister@cdschools.org. This document, and other information, can be found at At this site, look under Academics in Technology Education. Information regarding the Blender program and development can be found at Blender users can also find information on how to use the program at Daily Blender news and tutorial links can be found at

3 Table Table of of Contents Contents Introductory Items v vi viii Introduction Rendering and Animation Basic Concepts Basic Key Commands Chapter 1- The Blender Interface The Blender Screen Viewport (Window) Types The User Preferences Window Open, Saving and Appending Files Packing Data Importing Objects (from other file formats) Moving Around in 3D Space Window and Button Control Creating Viewports Working with Basic Meshes Using Main Modifiers to Manipulate Meshes Edit Mode- Mesh Editing The Tool Shelf Proportional Editing Joining/Separating Meshes, Boolean Operations Chapter 2- Working with Viewports (windows) Chapter 3- Creating and Editing Objects Chapter 4- Blender Render Engines The Classic Render Engine The Cycles Render Engine Tweaking Cycles for Speed & Quality Chapter 5- Materials and Textures Basic Material Settings Basic Texture Settings Using Images and Movies as Textures Displacement Mapping Materials and Textures in Cycles Chapter 6- Setting Up a World 6-1 Using Color, Mist and Textures Using an Image in the Background Cycles World Settings Chapter 7- Lighting and Cameras 7-1 Camera Settings and Options Using Nodes for Depth-of-Field, Green Screen (Chroma Key), and More Lighting Types and Settings Indirect Lighting Basic Setup Options Rendering Movies and Images Network Rendering 9-2 Reflection (mirror) and Refraction (transparency) Chapter 8- Render Settings Chapter 9- Ray-Tracing (mirror, transparency, shadows) 9-1 Lighting and Shadows Chapter 10- Animation Basics Basic Key-framing and Auto Key-framing Working with the Graph Editor and Dope Sheet Animating Materials, Lamps and World Settings (and more) i

4 Table of Contents (continued) Chapter 11- Adding 3D Text Blender 3D Text Settings Converting to a Mesh Chapter 12- NURBS and Meta Shape Basics Using NURBS to create lofted shapes Liquid and droplet effects using Meta Shapes Basic Mesh Modifiers Simulation Modifiers Chapter 13- Modifiers Chapter 14- Particle Systems and Interactions Particle Settings and Material Influence (Cycles) Using the Explode Modifier Particle Interaction With Objects and Forces Using Particles for Hair and Grass Using Child-Parented Objects Adjusting Object Centers (pivot points) Chapter 15- Child-Parent Relationships Chapter 16- Working With Constraints Tracking To An Object Following Paths and Curves Using Armatures to Deform Meshes Creating Vertex Groups Using Inverse Kinematics (IK) and Other Constraints Creating Mesh Keys Using Action Editor Sliders Chapter 17- Armatures (bones and skeletons) Chapter 18- Relative Vertex Keys (shape keys) Chapter 19- Object Physics Creating Fabric and Fluid Effects with Interactions Realistic Object Interactions in Real-Time and Animations Duplicating Meshes to Create Screws and Gears Using Mesh Editing to Create Revolved Shapes Blender Add-On Meshes Setting Up the Tracking Scene Using Masks and Materials Chapter 20- Creating Springs, Screws, Gears and other Add-On Shapes Chapter 21- Video Motion Tracking Chapter 22- Game Engine Basics (real-time animation) Setting Up The Physics Engine Applying Materials Using Game Physics in Animation Using Logic Blocks Using Basic Mapping GLSL Shading Chapter 23- UV Texture Mapping Chapter 24- Video Sequence Editor Producing a Movie From Individual Clips and Images Adding an Audio Track Chapter 25-3D Printing Tools Fundamentals of 3D Printing Using Blender to Create 3D Printer Models Exporting Models Educational Standards Alignment Index ii

5 Performance Practice Exercises Tasks Chapter 1 Setting Up Your Interface Chapter 2 Multiple Viewport Configuration Chapter 3 Create a Sculpture Modeling a Landscape and Lighthouse Adding Windows to the Lighthouse Challenge Task: Creating a 3D Logo Chapter 4 Test Renderings Chapter 5 Adding Classic Materials & Textures to the Lighthouse Scene Challenge Task: Cycles Shading for the Lighthouse Scene Chapter 6 Creating an Environment for Your Scene Challenge Task: A Sculpture Environment Chapter 7 Lighting Up the Landscape Scene Challenge Task: Cycles Scene and Blur Chapter 8 Saving a Picture of Your Scene Chapter 9 Reflection and Refraction Challenge Task: Cycles Reflection and Refraction Chapter 10 Adding Motion to Your Scene Challenge Task: A Logo or Sculpture in Motion Chapter 11 Company Logo Challenge Task: Production Logo Chapter 12 The Lava Lamp Challenge Task: The Spill iii iii

6 Practice Exercises Performance Tasks Chapter 13 Common Modifiers Exercise Challenge Task: Insect Study Chapter 14 Adding Rain to Your Scene Challenge Task: A Fireworks Display& Candle... Chapter 15 The Robotic Arm Challenge Task: A Simple Character... Chapter 16 A Camera That Follows the Arm Challenge Task: A Simple Roller Coaster... Chapter 17 Create a Hand With Armatures Challenge Task: Flubber Character... Chapter 18 Cheesy Actor Monkey Chapter 19 A Waving Flag Making a Splash With Fluids Challenge Task: Rube Goldberg Invention... Chapter 20 Turning Gears Challenge Task: An Animated Spring... Chapter 21 Composite Desk Scene Chapter 22 A Simple Maze Runner Chapter 23 Creating a Texture Wrap Challenge Task: Texture Your Maze... Chapter 24 Video Portfolio Chapter 25 Chess Piece iv

7 Introduction Introduction About Blender How can Blender be free? People usually associate freeware software with the terms bad, with limited features or just a demo. Blender is fully functional. It works as an open-sourced, community development program where people from around the world contribute to its success. Blender is a rendering\animation\game development open-sourced freeware program maintained by the Blender Foundation and can be downloaded, free of charge, from The goal of the foundation can be summarized as follows: The Blender Foundation is an independent organization (a Dutch stichting ), acting as a non-profit public benefit corporation, with the following goals: 1. To establish services for active users and developers of Blender. 2. To maintain and improve the current Blender product via a public accessible source code system under the GNU GPL license. 3. To establish funding or revenue mechanisms that serve the foundation s goals and cover the foundation s expenses. 4. To give the worldwide Internet community access to 3D technology in general, with Blender as a core. Blender website (blender.org) Blender can be a difficult program to learn with limitless possibilities. What do you teach in the time you have to teach? That s a tough question because you can t teach it all. This tutorial book is designed to get you up and running in the basics of creating objects and scenes and animating. The best advice I can give you about learning this program is Don t Give Up! All rendering and animation programs have a tough learning curve. After a few weeks, things get easier. This tutorial has been developed to be used in conjunction with daily lesson planning and demonstrations. Because of this, some areas of Blender have not been described as fully as they could be. If you are using this guide as a stand-alone teaching or self-help tool, you may need to seek additional help from reputable places like and to make sense of things. These sites give you access to help forums and tutorials. There are literally thousands of Blender users world-wide that browse the forums to give and get advice. Make use of that vast knowledge base! Version Information: The current release at the time of this printing is version Since Blender is developed by a worldwide pool of individuals giving freely of their time, releases happen often. New for this edition: While most of the activities here use the classic render engine due to classroom time constraints (cycles rendering is very time intensive), a unit (and more) has been added for the cycles render engine. There are also new challenge tasks for those students that are looking for extra, or alternate, activities. Reference to education standards, reflective writing, motion tracking, and 3D printing have also been added. v

8 Rendering and Animation Rendering and Animation Basics RENDERING: A rendering is a pictorial output of a 3D scene or object. Features like materials, lighting, oversampling and shadows control the effects and quality of the rendering. The more of these features you add, the more realistic your scene become, but also lengthens rendering times. Materials and Textures: You can control the way an object appears by applying color and textures. Materials provide realism with added effects. You an control glossiness (specular), self-emitting lighting characteristics, transparency and pattern repetition. Ray-tracing can provide reflection (mirror) and refraction (transparency) effects. Textures can be made from any scanned photograph or drawn object in an image-editing or painting-type program. Images in almost any format (jpg, bitmap, png) can be used. Blender also has many built-in texture generators that can simulate a variety of surface characteristics such as wood, marble, clouds, waves and surface roughness. Lighting: Lighting provides the realism to your scene through reflections and shadows. You can control the type of light, intensity and color. Some lights can give a fog or dusty look with a halo or volume lighting effect. Illumination distances can also be set. Cameras: Your camera is your point-of-view for the scene. Just like a real camera, you can control lens length to achieve close-ups or wide angles. Clipping distance can also be set to control how far and near the camera sees. Depth-of-field can be controlled using nodes. ANIMATION: An animation is a series of rendered images that form a movie. The quality of your movie is controlled by all of the above mentioned features including frames per second (fps), output size, file type and compression. The most common method of animation is called key-framing. Key frames are created at various points in the animation while the computer generates all of the transition frames between the two keys. Basic animation options include changing size, rotation and location of objects. vi

9 Rendering Rendering and and Animation Animation Time Factors: In order to animate, you must first set the length of your animation in frames and your frames per second (fps). The length in time can be calculated from these. Frame Rate Options: NTSC- U.S. and Japan video standard of 30 fps Film- Movie standard of 24 fps PAL- European video standard of 25 fps *We typically use a frame rate of fps depending on computer speed or if we plan to save the file to DVD. Hit the PAL or NTSC setting buttons for these. Creating Keys: A key is placed at the beginning and end of a desired move, size change or rotation of an object. Think in terms of how long you want a change to occur and relate it to your fps. For example, if you want an object to move from point A to point B in 2 seconds and you have 30 fps, place 2 keys 60 frames apart. Following Paths and Objects: In most animation programs, a camera can follow a path or object (or both) as it moves. This feature saves a lot of animation time and reduces the number of keys needed. Output Options: We typically save our movies in MPEG format for Windows. This type of file plays easily on most media players and at a high quality. Depending on how you plan to use your movie (i.e. on the web, saved to DVD, played in a presentation), you may wish to use different formats. Examples include Apple Quicktime and Windows AVI formats. Different formats also allow you to adjust the quality settings. For example, AVI formats can be compressed using a variety of compressors called CODECs. Rendering sizes: Animations are saved in a measurement unit called a pixel. Your computer and TV screens display images as small dots. The more dots, or pixels, per inch, the higher the resolution. Modern displays and TVs use square pixels, but older TV sets used rectangular pixels. This made it somewhat more difficult to render images because the output from 3D animation programs needed to be compressed into a non-square ratio format. Since most TVs have been replaced by modern flat screens, we can begin to get away from these older, confusing ratios and work with 1:1 pixel ratios. vii vii

10 Basic Key Commands Rendering and Animation The next considerations deal with render sizes: 1. The older TV standard of 4:3 ratio size or the newer TV (and film)16:9 ratio size. 2. Standard Definition (SD) or High Definition (HD). This decision will most likely be controlled by the type of result you need and how much time you have to render the project. Until recently, we have always worked with DVD standard definition 4:3 renderings in the classroom. We are changing most of our projects to HDTV 720p to better fit modern TVs and online video postings. While high definition renderings can produce better projects, the cost in rendering times would make it almost impossible for us to complete projects in the classroom during the school day, even with the small render farm we have in the lab. Standard definition still looks great played back on modern TVs and renders at a fraction of the time of higher HD. Here are the frame sizes for each type of render: Real-Time Animation and Physics: Blender uses the Bullet physics engine to make objects react in your scene like they would in real life. The Bullet physics engine was used in movies like 2012 to create all of the realistic-looking animations of falling and reacting objects. Real-time animation allows you to add physical properties to your objects and use the keyboard and other features to control them. You can create actors, change masses, control dampening (friction), set force and torque in x, y, and z planes and create relationships with other objects within the scene. With time and practice, interesting 3D games, animations, and real-time architectural walk-throughs can be created. Blender allows you to use the physics engine to create animation tracks. You can now use the physics to create realistic falling, rolling, etc. animations and use them in movies. viii

11 Basic Basic Key Key Commands Commands Basic Blender Commands This is just a partial list of Blender commands. Please visit the Blender.org website for more details. TAB key- Toggles between edit mode (vertex editing) and object select mode. If you re in edit mode when you create a new object, it will be joined to the selected object. Ctrl Z The global UNDO command. With each press, one step will be undone (up to 32 steps possible by default). If in edit mode, it will only undo editing steps on the selected object. Space Bar- Brings up a search window to find basic commands. Z keytoggles view from wireframe to solid. Alt Z Toggles a texture/shaded view. R keyrotates an object or selected vertices. (pressing X,Y,Z after R will limit effect) S keyscales a selected object or vertices. (pressing X,Y,Z after S will limit effect) G key- Grabs or moves the object or selected vertices. (pressing X,Y,Z after G limits effect) A keywhile in edit mode it s good for selecting all vertices for commands like remove doubles and subdivide. Pressing A twice will clear selected and reselect. Alt A Plays animation in selected window. Your cursor must be in that window for it to play. Ctrl A After an object has been re-sized and/or rotated, this can reset the object s data to 1 and 0. W key- Brings up a Specials menu while in edit mode of specific edit mode options. Shift- D - Duplicates or copies selected objects or selected vertices. E keywhile in edit mode, selected vertices can be extruded by pressing E. O key- The O key (not zero) will put you into proportional vertex editing while in edit mode. Proportional editing now also works in object mode. B keygives you a box (window drag) to select multiple objects. In edit mode, works the same to select multiple vertices. C key- Gives you a circle select in edit mode that can be sized by scrolling the mouse wheel. Press LMB to select, press wheel to deselect. Right mouse click or Esc to exit. Shift- A - Brings up the tools menu where you can add meshes, cameras, lights, etc. Number Pad- Controls your views. 7 top, 1 front, 3 side, 0 camera, 5 perspective,. zooms on selected object, + and zoom in and out. The + - buttons also control affected vertices size in proportional vertex editing. MouseLeft to manipulate (LMB), right to select (RMB), center wheel to zoom and rotate view. If you hold down shift and center wheel you can pan around on the screen. Shift Key- Hold down the shift key to make multiple selections with the right mouse button. Arrow Keys-Used to advance frames in animation. Left/right goes 1 frame at a time, up/down goes 10 frames at a time. P keywhile in edit mode, pressing P will seperate selected verticies. In object mode, pressing P will cause you to enter into the game (real-time) mode. Press Esc to exit game mode. ATL/CTRL P -Creates or breaks child/parent relationships. To create C/P relationships, hold down shift key and select child first, then parent. Hit Ctrl P. To clear a relationship, do the same except hit Alt P. U keyin Object Mode, brings up the Single-User menu to unlink materials, animations (IPOs), etc. for linked or copied objects. M key- Moves selected objects to other layers. Ctrl M Mirrors an object. Select M, then X,Y,or Z to mirror on that axis. N keybrings up the numeric info. on a selected object (location, rotation and size). Info. can then be changed in the panel. ix

12 Practice Exercises Ctrl J Ctrl L - Joins selected objects together. Link mesh's data to another mesh. Good for copying materials and other object data from one object to other objects. While holding the Shift key, select all the objects with the one containing the material or other data last. Press Ctrl- L and select you option. F keymakes a face in edit mode of the selected vertices. You can only select 3-4 vertices at a time to make a face. By selecting 2 verticies and pressing F will close shape. Alt F Will Face or Fill a closed set of selected verticies. Ctrl F Brings up a Face Specials menu with other face options. Shift F Camera Flying is enabled and will cause the camera to fly through the scene. X or Delete- Delete selected objects, vertices or faces. K -LMB In edit mode, K and left mouse button will allow you to slice faces. Ctrl R In edit mode, will bring up options to slice or cut faces. Shift- S In both edit and object modes, this will give you options to locate objects or the cursor to assist in precise placement. Function Keys-F1-Load File; F2-Save File; F3-Repeat History; F11-Last Render; F12-Render I KeyThe I key is used to insert animation keys for various things. Objects can be animated with basic Rotation, Location and Size keys and combinations there of. T Key Opens the Toolbox at the side of your viewport. Ctrl T Used to create a Track To Constraint to make one object follow another (like a camera with a target). Ctrl S Used to Save your Blender file Alt C Used to convert meshes, text and curves. For example, text can be converted into a mesh for other transform options. Shift Space Toggles between multiple screens to full screen of active view port. Can also use Ctrl - Up Arrow to do the same thing. Ctrl 0 If using multiple cameras, this will switch to the selected camera. (Number pad 0 ) Armatures- Meshes can be controlled by bones or armatures. Create a mesh with vertices at the joint locations, then create an armature string within it. Child/Parent the mesh to the armature using the armature option. You can then animate in Pose Mode. Ctrl-TabPuts you into Pose mode for manipulating armatures. Import/Export- Blender accepts many different file formats through the import/export commands. When inserting other Blender files or objects into another scene, use the APPEND option from the file menu and select the appropriate options. Multiple objects can be selected with Shift-Right mouse button. Multiple Viewports- To create multiple viewports, move your cursor to the upper-right corner of an existing viewport. When your cursor turns into a + over the tab triangle, press LMB and drag to spit viewport area. To join areas, repeat the process. The Basic Blender Buttons: Editor (window) Type Scene Settings Render Setting x Object Settings World Settings Modifiers Constraints Material Settings Object Data Particles Texture Settings Physics