Pa r t I any actual character animation, you need a character to animate. RI Before you do AL Creating a Character with Blender TE The goal of the first part of this book is to get you comfortable enough with the modeling MA and rigging tools in Blender to translate your own ideas into actual 3D characters. Blender has powerful mesh modeling tools and a very flexible system for creating materials and D textures.
Chapter 1 Blender Basics: Interface and Objects The first hurdle in learning any complex piece of software is to become familiar with the interface. In the past, this was especially true of Blender, which had until recently garnered a reputation for an idiosyncratic and often perplexing interface. With the release of the long-awaited Blender 2.5, this reputation may change. Blender 2.
■ Chapter 1: Blender Basics : Interface and Objects Work Areas and Window Types Figure 1.1 When you first open Blender, one or two windows will open on your system’s desktop, depending on the operating system you use. In Windows, your main Blender window appears in front of the Blender console window. In Linux, the console is hidden unless you open Blender from the command line in a terminal window, in which case the Blender console is the terminal.
Work Areas and Window Types You are now looking at your Blender desktop, which should appear a lot like Figure 1.1. The Blender desktop consists of a nonoverlapping configuration of windows. By default, the windows are arranged as shown in Figure 1.2. As you can see, five windows appear in this configuration. Each window holds a different editor type as identified in the figure. The darker gray areas indicate the placement of each window’s header.
■ Chapter 1: Blender Basics : Interface and Objects Figure 1.3 Dragging borders to resize windows Figure 1.
Work Areas and Window Types Figure 1.5 Figure 1.6 Merging two windows The Editor Type menu The editor types are as follows: 3D View Displays 3D objects and scenes in various modes, including the Object, Edit, and Pose modes. This editor allows a variety of viewing options, including toggled perspective/orthographic drawing (Numpad 5). The shortcut for accessing the 3D view is Shift+F5. Timeline Displays the progress through time of an animation.
■ Chapter 1: Blender Basics : Interface and Objects Video Sequence Editor Enables nonlinear editing, compositing, and playback of video sequences. It can take still-frame or video sequences as input. You can access the Video Sequence Editor with Shift+F8. Text Editor Enables text editing. You often use this editor type as an area for notes about the blend file or for Python scripting. You can execute Python scripts from the Text Editor using the Alt+P hotkeys.
Navigating the 3D Space In this book, the term window usually refers to a window with a specific editor type active. For example, the term 3D view window will mean a window with the 3D View editor type selected. It’s perfectly possible to have more than one instance of the same editor type open in separate windows doing different things at the same time. For example, you can have two or more 3D view windows open at once looking at your 3D scene from different directions.
■ Chapter 1: Blender Basics : Interface and Objects it rotate around the active object by setting the Rotate Around Selection option in the Interface user preferences in the User Preferences window. Ctrl+MMB (or mouse wheel) Zooms in and out in the 3D space. Shift+MMB Pans 3D view. If the Emulate 3 Button Mouse option is selected on the Input tab of the user preferences, you can emulate the middle mouse button by Alt+clicking.
Navigating the 3D Space ■ 11 own machine is one of the first hurdles to learning to work with Blender. Table 1.1 and Table 1.2 list the most important Blender hotkeys. You can configure all Blender hotkeys in the user preferences, but if you plan to use Blender frequently, particularly if you plan to use multiple installations of Blender, then I recommend getting used to the defaults where you can. Hotkey All modes Table 1.
■ Chapter 1: Blender Basics : Interface and Objects Table 1.
Navigating the 3D Space You can toggle the layers that are visible in the 3D viewport and to the renderer by using the buttons mentioned previously or by using the keyboard number keys (not the numeric keypad). You can toggle multiple layers at once by Shift+clicking the buttons. The top row of layers corresponds to the keyboard number keys 1 through 0. The bottom row of layers corresponds to Alt+1 through Alt+0.
■ Chapter 1: Blender Basics : Interface and Objects Figure 1.8 The 0 key on the numeric pad switches to the active camera viewpoint. A dotted rectangle frames the view, indicating the video-safe area, as you can see in Figure 1.8. If the camera is on a visible layer, a solid rectangle also appears, representing the camera. You can right-click this rectangle to select the camera, like any other object.
Navigating the 3D Space the currently active object, Shift+right-click it. Shift+right-click the active object to remove it from the selection. By pressing the Z key, you can toggle between the wireframe and solid views. In solid view, you cannot select objects that are completely obscured from the view by other objects. You must either move your view to a place where you can get to the object or enter wireframe view.
■ Chapter 1: Blender Basics : Interface and Objects Figure 1.
Navigating the 3D Space ■ 17 Restricting to Axes When you rotate, translate, or scale, you often want to restrict the operation to a particular axis or to fix one axis while operating in the other two. To select an axis to rotate, scale, or translate along, press X, Y, or Z after pressing the R, S, or G key. This restricts the operation to the global axis. Press the axis key twice to restrict the operation along the object’s local corresponding axis.
■ Chapter 1: Blender Basics : Interface and Objects the same to the child object. However, the relationship is not symmetrical. Like a moon around a planet, the child object can move or rotate in relation to the parent object without influencing the parent object. To define a parent relationship, select more than one object. The active object is the last object selected, and by default it is highlighted with a lighter orange than the previously selected objects.
Objects and Datablocks In Blender, the basic 3D entity is an object. There are a number of different types of objects, each of which has different characteristics and different kinds of data associated with it. All objects have the characteristics of location, rotation, and size. In addition to location, scale, and rotation, each 3D object is associated with a datablock of specific information to its type.
■ Chapter 1: Blender Basics : Interface and Objects highlighted fields in that figure indicate the object name and the name of the Mesh datablock. They both read Cube. Because objects and datablocks have separate namespaces, it is not a problem for them to be named identically; in fact, most of the time, it is intuitive, so they should be named identically.
Objects and Datablocks Although the mesh data is identical, the objects are still very much independent. To see this, in Object mode, select the Cube object. Press S, and scale the object to about twice its size. Now you have a big cone and a small cone. This is because mesh edits are made to the Mesh datablock, which is now shared between the objects, whereas the overall scale is an object-level property. Go back to the mesh drop-down menu on the Cube object and look at the options.
■ Chapter 1: Blender Basics : Interface and Objects Managing Datablocks Figure 1.17 (a) The default Cube mesh has one user, the Cube object. If it is unlinked from this object, it is not persisted after the file is closed because it has no users. (b) By toggling the F button, a fake user is added (the 2 refers to the number of users for that datablock). Now, even if there are no real users of the datablock, it persists because its user count is not zero.
User Preferences Accessing Data from Different Files You often need access to objects or datablocks from other files. Animation projects can quickly get far too big to store in single .blend files, and yet many different scenes and shots may share the same main elements. You can access datablocks between separate files in Blender in several ways. The first and simplest way is to use append. To append a datablock from another file, select Append from the File menu or press Shift+F1.
■ Chapter 1: Blender Basics : Interface and Objects Figure 1.21 they are all a matter of taste, so experiment with different settings. I recommend you check the Rotate Around Selection option, particularly if you plan to do mesh modeling. This ensures that whatever you are working on stays centered on your screen when you rotate the space. The User Preferences window Editing Presents options for editing objects, animation curves, grease pencil sketches, and other kinds of editing.
User Preferences ■ 25 Themes Enables you to tweak the colors and some other properties of visual elements of Blender. The visual elements of all editor types can be adjusted in this way. Figure 1.22 File Enables access to file-related preferences including default file paths and options for Editing the hotkey combination for saving a Blender file how many backup versions to save and how often to autosave.
