Week 1 The Blender Interface and Basic Shapes

Transcription

1 Week 1 The Blender Interface and Basic Shapes Blender Blender is an open-source 3d software that we will use for this class to create our 3d game. Blender is as powerful as 3d Studio Max and Maya and has a rapidly growing community of users. It also has a build-in game engine that uses logic bricks instead of coding for 3d Games development, which makes things much easier. So even if you have no programming skills you can design a standalone game. You can download bender for free from the official website: The version we currently use is 2.49 and you can find it for both Mac and Windows in the Blender website If you need to get help and extra information there are some very good reference websites to have in mind: Blender Wiki: Blender Artists Forums: Blender Cookie (Tutorials): Blender Noob to Pro (Tutorials): The Blender Interface The Blender window is horizontally split in two main parts: the upper part is the 3D view and the lower part is the buttons panel. We can resize the screens by grabbing the line that divides them and dragging it. We can also split the screens by clicking the RMB (right mouse button) on the horizontal line that divides the two windows > split area > move cursor where we want to split > click. To join the screens back together we move the cursor over the one we want to delete and click.

2 Headers and Screens Each window has a header (which, by default is at the bottom of the 3D viewport, and the top of the buttons pallet). Right click on the header to define if it is to be at the top or bottom of a window. At the far left-hand side of the header is the Window Type button. Click this to get a menu of all available window types. You'll see that there are quite a few, but for now we'll stick with the 3D View and the Buttons Window. A 3-button mouse When we use Blender it s better to use a three button mouse since we need it to navigate around the 3D view. Rotate MMB (middle mouse button) and drag the mouse (or Alt+LMB if you don't have a three button mouse) Pan MMB + shift and move the mouse (or shift+alt+lmb if you don't have a three button mouse) Zoom in and out roll the wheel (Ctrl+Alt+LMB if you don't have a three button mouse)

3 Default scene objects Cube: a polygon primitive (the basis of building a more complex geometry) Camera: when rendering later on (previewing our 3d models) we will do so from the camera view (we render what the camera is looking at). The camera object in Blender can have properties and is fully animatable) Lamp: lights the scene (without it we will see nothing when we try to render only a black screen) Grid: comprises from 6x6 large squares (each of which comprises from 10x10 smaller ones). Each of the small ones is one Blender unit*. *note: There is no defined value for the Blender Unit. As a 3D Designer you can assign it to be as large as you wish according to the needs of your project. E.g. a common measurement is 1BU = 1meter. But make sure you stay consistent in the proportions you chose throughout the whole project. (if for example you want to model a character a good way to go about it would be to assign 1BU=10cm since if you choose one meter the scale is too big and a realistic character would be around two BU big) Axes: X, Y, Z on the bottom left corner of the screen. 3D cursor: resembles a target icon and indicates where new object will be added on the screen (use left mouse button and click on the grid to position it).

4 Selecting, Deleting and Saving in Blender To select an object in Blender you need to Right click on it!! Not left click as we are used to from other software. This may look tricky at first but it will soon become a second nature. Selected objects have a pink highlight around them. To multi select you can either hold down sift and right click on objects or to use the Box selection tool. This tool created a box than helps us select more than one objects at once. Hit B once and drag the mouse over the area you want to select. Release the mouse and see that all objects within this area are selected. To Delete an object, select it and hit the X button on your keyboard. Or to delete everything and start a new project hit ctrl + X and verify you wish to Erase All. To Save hit ctrl+s or go to File > Save to save your project. Use the browser window to determine where you want to save. White titles are used for folders and black for files. The file that will be created will end with.blend Remember!! Blender doesn t use a prompt to verify if you want to save before quitting so do not close the program before you have saved your work. Min/Max and Undo/Redo Place the mouse pointer over the 3D View window, and press ctrl+up arrow key. This sends the window with the cursor over it to full screen. Ctrl + down arrow key sets the Windows back to normal. As in other programs Blender uses the ctrl + Z buttons for undo and ctrl + Y for redo. User Preferences Panel There are various operations that can be achieved through the User Preferences Panel. This Panel is by default hidden when you launch Blender. To reveal it place the cursor over the dividing line of the upper header. The cursor changes to double arrows and then you can drag down.

5 Some of the controls that can be achieved through this panel are: 1. Make sure you have the Auto- Saves selected. This will help you avoid losing important work in case the program crashes. Hit the Auto Save button and then make sure the Auto Save Temp Files is enabled. Those versions will be saved in the Temp folder of your computer (Usually within C: ), every To control the Undo levels that Blender can go back, go to Edit Methods > Undo Steps (32 by default) > drag to increase the number of available Undo. 3. If you are working on a laptop it is very useful to be able to Emulate the umpad that is missing, since we will need this later on to change the views. To do so go to System and Open GL and hit the Emulate Numpad button. Using different Views Happily, we can quickly switch between views using the number pad (not the number keys): Top view: 7 (sift + 7 = Bottom) Front view: 1 (sift + 1 = Back) Side view: 3 (sift + 3 = Other side) Camera view: 0 To move the camera to the current view, hold alt + shift + NUMPAD 0 (zero). Alternatively you can use the 'View' list on the 3D view header, to change between views. Sometimes it is helpful to split the screen when modeling and assign different views in each screen to see your mesh from different angles at the same time.

6 Add and Delete Objects To add primitives on the scene hit space > add >mesh >select object. By hitting space you can also select to add lights, cameras, curves and so on.

7 Manipulate the object To scale an object, press the S key. Move the mouse in and out to resize the mesh, then LMB click to confirm. If we're going to make anything from the default cube, we'll want to scale it along particular axes. After hitting S (for scale), press the X, Y or Z key to scale along a particular axis. To move/translate an object, press the G key ('grab'), and use the same x, y, z keys to constrain the movement. Rotation is the same: R key (rotate), then select the axis to rotate round. Basic Render Now we will see how you can render a model as a still image. Go to the Scene Buttons (F10) and click on the large Render Button. Rememeber! You are rendering from the camera angle (whatever the camera sees) so to position the camera before rendering go to Camera view (Numpad 0) and RMB on camera to select it and position it. *note that only the 3D view that falls into the double dotted lines will show on the render. Once the image is displayed hit F3 or go to File > Save Rendered Image to save your render as a.jpeg.