Welcome to Blender! Intro to Blender Creating a Screensaver

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1 Intro to Blender Creating a Screensaver Shane Trautsch Crestwood High School Welcome to Blender! Blender is a 3-D modeling software that can be used for almost anything. It s my job to give you an introduction in this, not to fry your brain, so stay calm. What you will learn -Move objects in a 3-D space -How to create text -How to create a scene -Use materials to change the color and look of objects OPTIONAL -Mesh modeling -Particle systems

2 Moving objects in a 3-D space An essential part of Blender is controlling the 3-D space in an efficient and clean manner. This will help everything you do work smoothly. You can control the 3-D space using your mouse and number-pad NOTE: if you have a laptop, settings will have to be changed in order to use the number-pad. The Number-pad will switch your view throughout the 3-D space 1 Front view 3 Side view 5 Perspective/Orthographic view 7 Top view NOTE: The other buttons (2,4,6,8,9) will also move your viewing around but these are the most important viewpoints. The first step in moving object in a 3-D space is learning how to select objects. When you first open Blender it should look like this Notice how the cube in the middle is outlined in orange. This means it is selected. Now press A to deselect the cube. Above: The cube unselected Now press B and click and drag over the cube to select it. ALTERNATIVELY simply right click on the cube with your mouse (holding down shift while doing

3 this will allow you to select more than one object.) Now we will learn how to move objects in the 3-D space. Select the cube using B and press G. Notice how the outline of the cube turns white, this means it can be moved. This can be done by simply dragging your mouse and clicking to set the cube in its new position. However, there is a more precise way to do this. After selecting the cube in the method you prefer and pressing G, press X. It will look like this. NOTE: By typing in a number the cube will be moved a to fixed position on the axis, this is useful in making precise movements. Also, instead of pressing X you can also press Y or Z and move the object on the other planes of view. Cheat sheet G Moves objects S Scales objects A Selects/Deselects all objects R Rotates objects Shift-C Centers cursor

4 Making Text First, delete the cube by selecting it and pressing X. A short drop down menu should appear. Next press Shift C, this will center your cursor in the middle of the scene. Now we have to create the text, press the SPACEBAR. This will bring up a search box, type in and select text. Congratulations! You just made text! Remember to save your progress. Saving is an essential part of working productively. Building habits of saving frequently saves you from redoing your work.

5 Customizing the Text I m sure none of you want your screensaver to say text. Changing the text into whatever you want is a simple but extremely important step. Switch to top view( 7), Select the text and press TAB, this changes things from Object mode (where all objects can be arranged) to edit mode (changing features of one object). Now you can delete text and type whatever you would like instead. Remember to press TAB when you are finished in order to return to object mode. It should look something like this. The next step is too rotate the text 90 degrees on the X-axis. So select the text, press R then limit the rotation with X. Type in 90 to rotate the text to an exact quarter turn, press Enter to finish the move. It should look like this. Notice how thin the text is? How it has no color? These are a few things that need to be changed. Features like this can be changed in the Outliner.

6 There are tons of features but we are going to look at just a few. The outliner is divided into different tabs based on what it interacts with. Select the one with the T the text outliner. Scroll down until you find the extrude feature, and change it to about.1 of.2 like so (The other settings can be changed to a Resolution of 4, and a Depth of o.o1) This thickens your text and makes it look more realistic, make sure to save your progress. A few other features that are helpful are changing the resolution, font, bevel, spacing, and size. Adding Color/Material Color is a very important part of screensavers. The basic way to get color is to add a material to your objects. This can be found in the outliner. Select the icon that looks like a ball- shown below There are many things that can be changed here but we are going to focus on just

7 one. But first we have to create the material, so select the cube, and then, click on the new material button in the material outliner. The diffuse color is the type of color that you will see. This is the one we will be changing today. Changing this color will allow you to adjust the main color of the text. A few other features to watch are the intensity, shading, and specularity. Now press F12 (Render) and you should see something like this. While this may be kind of dull looking, we will be making many additions to this

8 and will make it look epic. REMINDER- Please remember to save. Creating the Scene Making the scene for your picture is very important. The main parts of this are camera, lamp, and world. You can think of this as a camera shoot. The camera takes a picture of the scene while the lamp provides the lighting, just like a camera shot. The world is in the outliner, it basically controls the space that is not taken up by objects. Click on world and select it in the outliner like so. For this tutorial, we want to select Real sky, paper sky, and fake sky, which will give us a nice look for a screensaver. One other possibility is changing the ambient lighting to a different color; this will change the background in the final render. Camera Just like in real life, blender uses a camera to take a picture. For this screenshot we are going to position the camera straight on. In order to do this select the camera, go into front view (press 1), and press Control-ALT-0 and the camera will move to your viewpoint.

9 Basic outline of the Scene You may have to center the text in the cameras view. (Press 0 to enter camera view) Selecting the camera and adjusting it with G should work nicely. Finally, we will add a lamp. For this tutorial the generic lamp will do. Simply move it in the scene. The Lamp is circled Now that you have this done you can save, then render the image. Go to the camera icon in the outliner and click render. Congratulations! You have successfully made a basic screensaver in Blender! Make sure to save the image.

10 Now what? From here you may want to try and make it your own. Try adding a plane using the spacebar, or maybe move your text to a different position with the camera. Experimentation is the key and the possibilities are limitless. Things to try Shift A Brings up a list of objects you can bring in. Particle Systems Compositing Animation Mesh Modeling

11 This is by no means a full introduction to Blender, but it is a starting point. There are TONS of tutorials out there. A few good places to check out would be blenderguru.com and the VREP community. I hope that this tutorial sparks your interest in Blender for years to come.