Bezier 2.62 3D Circle

This tutorial is the first in a series on modeling with curves in Blender. Mesh modeling is based on polygons, straight lines connected together to form a face. Most objects occurring in nature (look at the palm of your hand, your face in a mirror, a leaf, or a drop of water), are curvy. Curves indicate naturalness and beauty, such as in a car, a house, or a flower. For example, if we say that a car is “boxy”, that’s a criticism of its straight line, polygonal, design. To make a car conform to our idea of beauty, the design needs some curves. Modeling an object with curves will give it a more natural, organic, look. Part of the problem with mesh modeling is that, no matter how much geometry you define (say for a human face), you’re never going to get the exact, natural shape of the object. Thus the need for modeling with curves.

2.5 Default Scene

The name of this video tutorial is Ira Krakow's Blender 2.5 Default Scene Tutorial. I would like to give a big Thank You shoutout to Neal Hirsig, of Tufts University, at http://www.gryllus.net, who created the video on which my video is based.

When you first open Blender a number of default windows, panels, and controls, are displayed. At first you might be intimidated by it, but as you become more familiar with the Blender interface, you'll find that the layout is very well organized and provides an efficient interface for modeling and animation.

2.49b Animated 3D Text

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In this tutorial, I will show you how to create animated 3D text in Blender 2.49b. You can use this type of effect to create, for example, rolling credits in your video. Or, perhaps, you can do something like the Star Wars introduction..."A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away...".

The techniques are based on Paolo Ciccone's excellent Blender 3D Survival Guide, which you can find at CreativeCow. Specifically, you can find how Paolo creates animated 3D text in Parts 3 and 4. The URLs are at:

http://library.creativecow.net/articles/ciccone_paolo/blender-survival-guide-3.php
http://library.creativecow.net/articles/ciccone_paolo/blender-survival-guide-4.php

2.49 Pixar Eye Tutorial

The goal of this tutorial is to make a Pixar-looking eye. The idea for this tutorial came from a post by KSF2010 on my Blender 3D Forum, at http://forum.irakrakow.com. He rendered a whale with "Pixar eyes". You can see his render at:

I was curious how to do Pixar eyes. He mentioned some tutorials on the web.

This tutorial is based on:
Iris texture: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/File:Iris.png

This tutorial uses the same modelling and texturing technique described in the well-known MAX tutorial by Adam Baroody.

2.49 Armature Animation

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The purpose of this video is to show how armature animation works in Blender 2.49b. Understanding how to move the bones in an armature is the key to being able to rig a character. We'll first create a basic skeleton-like armature. Then, I will show the difference between FK (Forward Kinematics) and IK (Inverse Kinematics). I like IK in particular because my initials are IK. It's also something we both have in common with the exquisitely unreadable German philosopher, Immanuel Kant.

Leaving the Categorical Imperative aside, we will create a simple hand wave cycle and introduce the Action Editor and the Non Linear Action Editor (NLA Editor), to give you an idea of how actions are defined and how they can be layered together to produce complex movement. We're concentrating on the armature only, how the skeleton moves, so to speak, not the object to be rigged. Once you have an armature, say, of a human, moving correctly, you can then rig it to a human-like object. This is the theory behind the ManCandy rig. I will discuss skinning, the process of associating an armature with a character, either 2 or 4 footed, or I guess any-other-number-of-footed creature, in another tutorial.

Steps:

1) Delete the default cube. We're going to create a primitive skeleton. Go to Animation view by selecting it from the View dropdown. Go to Front View (Num1). Add an armature (Space - Add - Armature). Scale the bone up 4 times (S - 4 - Enter). Look at the Outliner. Expand the Armature outline. Note that the Armature has one bone, called Bone.

Tab into Edit mode. A bone is a child object to the armature. A bone has three parts, the tip, the root, and the body. A bone can be selected in one of two ways. One way is to select the bone's body, which will also select the bone's tip and root. The other way is to right click on the body and shift right click on the root, which selects the body, which is between the tip and the root. Press W for the Specials menu. Select Subdivide Multi, with 4 cuts. So now we have 5 bones, which can function as a primitive spinal cord. Expanding the Armature display in the outliner shows that the bones are named Bone.001, Bone.002, Bone.003, and Bone.004, parented to Bone. You can also see the names in the 3D view by going to the Edit buttons (F9)and pressing the Names button. Press the Names button again to turn the names off.

2) Turn on X-Axis Mirror. This is a handy tool which lets you create mirrored bones on the X axis. When the bones are symmetrical, using X axis mirror means that you only need to create bones on one side. Mirrored bones are created on the other side. Normally, to simply add a bone, you press the E key, which extrudes the bone. However, with X-axis mirror turned on, you can add mirrored bones by pressing Shift-E. If X-Axis Mirror is turned off, Shift-E acts like the E key, just extruding one bone. we'll also mirror extrude 2 legs with Shift-E.

Here's how it works. We're going to create two primitive arm bones, on the left and the right, at the same time. With the tip of the 4th bone of the "spine" selected, press Shift-E. This creates two bones, on the left and the right, which can be scaled. Press Enter when the bones are at the desired size. Select the tip of the newly created bone on the right and press Shift-E again. This creates two more mirrored bones.

We can create mirrored legs. Select the root of the lowest bone of the armature. Press Shift-E to create two "legs". Then select the tip of the bone on the lower right. Press Shift-E to create two more bones, for the feet. I hope you get the idea. I'll leave it to you to create fingers and hands, but for now, we have the basic skeletal bone strucure.

Let's see how bones are named. From the Editing buttons, in the Armature panel, click on Names. Names shows you the names of the bones that were generated. An easy way to see how the bones are named is by using the Outliner. The original bone is called Bone. The spine bones were created with the suffix .001, .002, .003, when the big bone was subdivided. Mirrored bones, the ones created with Shift-E, have an additional _R and _L, depending on whether they are created on the left or the right. Look at the outliner. You can see that each leg is parented off the base bone, Bone. If you look at a detailed armature, such as the Mancandy rig, you'll see that the bones have meaningful names, like Left Arm, Right Pinky, and so on.

The outliner clearly shows parent-child relationships in the armature. This is important when we start posing the armature. Turn off names.

3) OK. Now we have a basic skeleton. Let's see how the bones move, in particular the difference between forward kinematics (FK) and Inverse Kinematics (IK). Blender has a special mode, called Pose Mode, allowing us to move bones so that the armature ends up in the position we want. We're going to create a simple arm wave, what Blender calls an Action. Blender has a special mode, called Pose Mode, for moving armature bones. We're at Frame 1. Select the two bones for the right arm (Right click on the arm, then Shift-Right click on the second bone). Press the I key. Select LocRot.

The curves don't appear in the IPO Curves editor, although they were created. The reason you don't see the curves is that you need to go to the Pose curves. Change the curve type from Object to Pose.

A handy feature in the timeline is the red button that automatically records keyframes as you move bones around. If you don't press it, you would need to remember which bones you moved as you keyframe. This way, Blender keyframes each move as you do it.

Now go to Frame 11 by pressing Up arrow or entering the number 11 in the current frame area. Select the arm bone and press the G key to move it up a bit. Then select the other arm bone and press the G key to move it up in a salute type position.

We've actually created half of the waving action. We'll complete it now. Switch the window from the IPO editor to the Action Editor. Note that there are 2 keyframed bones, Bone.003_L, and Bone.003_L.001. The diamonds indicate the keyframe. To complete the wave, select the two diamonds (they're yellow when selected and white when unselected), at Frame 1. Then press Shift-D to copy. Finally, drag the two diamonds to Frame 21. Drag the vertical green arrow and watch the wave. Press Control-DownArrow to maximize the Action Editor. Rename the action to Wave, from Action. Press Control-DownArrow to return the Action Editor to it's original position.

Let's see the difference between FK and IK. Select the right arm bone. Turn on the AutoIK button. Grab the arm and move it. Note how the whole skeleton, except for the legs, move. This is definitely not how an arm moves. It's actually more appropriate for a leg. IK actually does movement backwards, to the root of the skeleton. You can change how far back the IK calculates by disconnecting a bone. To show this, select the third bone, go into Edit Mode (Tab), and click the CON button, which disconnects this bone. Go back into Pose Mode. Select the arm again, and move it. Note that the movement stops at the disconnected bone. FK does movement forwards.

There's one last window to see, the NLA Editor. This lets us mix different types of actions. Change the window type to NLA Editor. You should see the Wave action. If you press the C key while the Wave action is highlighted, you're prompted to change the action to an NLA Strip. Press Enter. These strips can be combined (wave + walk + hip swivel + talk, and so on). A detailed explanation of the NLA Editor is the subject of a future tutorial.

So that's a brief look into the basics of animating an armature. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, be sure to hit the Youtube Subscribe button so you won't miss any of my future tutorials. Happy Blendering!

2.50 Animation Part 2

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In my first animation video, I showed how to keyframe location, rotation, scale, and material color, as well as how to group keyframed properties into keying sets. I left you probably wondering how, considering that the IPO window has disappeared, you can change the curves by editing them as you could do in Version 2.4x. In this video, I will show you how this is done, and how, overall, the animation process is easier than before. We will also look at some properties that now can be keyframed, such as modifiers, as well as the new F-Curve system.

Steps:

1) Start with the default scene, with the default cube. Change to the Animation view. In the Animation view, there are a number of new windows, in addition to the 3D window. The three that specifically relate to animation are on the left part of the screen. At the top is the Dopsheet, which is the new name for the Action Editor. As before, pressing Ctrl-down arrow makes the window full screen. We'll be doing this a lot in this video, to see what's going on in a particular window. Pressing Control-down arrow again returns the window to its original size.

In the middle left part is the Graph Editor, which is the new version of the 2.4x IPO Editor. You can edit animation curves in the Graph Editor. The organization of the curves has been redone, with major enhancements which I'll point out as we go.

At the bottom right corner is the timeline, the window which has changed the least. As before, you can scrub the animation by dragging the vertical green arrow, and the VCR llke keys do roughly what they did before. As I mentioned in the 2.50 Animation Part 1 tutorial, you can now run the animation backwards.

Before we start, set the end frame of the animation to 50 frames by entering 50 in the End area of the Timeline.

We're going to insert a LocRotScale keyframe at Frame 1, to start the animation process. It works the same way. Position the cursor over the 3D window. Press the I key. Select LocRotScale. Let's see what happened. It looks like there were some curves added in the Graph Editor. Press Ctrl-Down Arrow to see what was added. We can't see what curves were added until we click on the left arrow, to expand the display.

Nine curves indeed were added, location, rotation, and scale, in the X, Y, and Z direction, as in 2.4x. The rotation curve has a new term - Euler - that wasn't there before. That's because rotation can be done in what's called Quaternions, as well as Eulers. For the time being, ignore this. Eulers are what we know as XYZ. We'll go into more detail about these curves after we actually animate the cube.

Press Control-Down Arrow to return the Graph Editor back to its original size.

Go to Frame 25. Press the G key and drag to move the cube over 4 or 5 Blender Units. Press Enter when done. Scale the cube up 2 times (S - 2 - Enter). Rotate the cube 45 degrees (R - 45 - Enter). Press the I key and insert an LoRotScale keyframe. Let's see what happened in the various graphs.

Start with the Graph Editor. Indeed, there are now 9 curves that we can see. They're all visible because all the check boxes at the left are checked. There's also an individual color assigned to each curve, such as red for the cube's X location. Let's in fact edit the curve for the cube's X location. To do that, uncheck all the boxes except for the X location curve. As before, each curve (they're now called F-curves) is a Bezier curve. You're in edit mode, with all the points, each representing a keyframe, selected. Press A to deselect all. Then right click on the ending keyframe. Move it up 2 Blender units or so by pressing the G key and moving it up. If you uncheck the Cube group and then check it again, all the curves display.

The lock icon controls whether or not a particular curve can be edited. If you click on it, the lock icon goes into the locked position and it can't be edited. If you click on it again, the curve is unlocked and can be edited.

Press Ctrl-Down Arrow to return the Graph Editor to its original location.

Press Alt-A to run the animation. The cube goes in the X direction, according to how you edited it.

The eye icon controls whether or not that particular curve contributes to the animation. It's a toggle. When the curve contributes to the animation, you see an eye. When it doesn't, the icon is greyed out. To show you how it works, click on all the eyes except the one associated with the X location curve. Press Control-Down Arrow to return the Graph Editor back to its original location. Press Alt-A or use the VCR keys to animate. Now the cube just moves in the X direction.

While we were animating, note that the Dopesheet, the graph at the top right part of the screen, was populated. Position the cursor over the Dopesheet and press Control-Down Arrow. These are actions that can be combined in the NLA editor. We won't discuss these in this video. I just wanted to point this out. There still seem to be some problems with screen refreshing of this window.

Let's see what happens when we animate another object. Let's add Suzanne to the scene (Shift-A, Add, Mesh, Monkey). Let's insert a LocRotScale keyframe for her. Press the I key, then select LocRotScale. Some more curves were added. Amazingly, we can edit the curves of both objects. What happened? First, Suzanne is now called "Mesh". There's an object called Mesh, as well as a mesh called "Mesh". As with the cube, the curves for what we used to know as Suzanne are in the Mesh's mesh. If you expand the Mesh Mesh, you'll see them. You can also view the Cube's curves.

Press Alt-Down Arrow to return the Graph Editor back to its original position.

The last thing I'll show in this video is that modifiers can be keyframed. This can make for amazing effects. Let's add an Array Modifier to the monkey. Set the current frame to 1. Then, click on the Modifier icon in the Mesh's Properties. Select Array. Change the count to 4. With the cursor on Count, in the Array Modifier area, right click. Select Insert Keyframe. Then go to Frame 25. Change the count to 2. With the cursor on Count, select Insert Keyframe. Press Alt-A to run the animation. Note how the number of monkeys changed.

Look at the Graph Editor. A new curve, called Count(Array) was created. There also is a Count(Array) curve created in the Dopesheet.

The goal is that any property you can see can be animated. Think of all the modifiers and all their properties that you can now animate easily.

Believe it or not, this only scratches the surface. I hope this tutorial gets you to think about how to use Blender 2.5's animation in your scenes. Don't forget to subscribe to my videos on Youtube so you won't miss any. Happy Blendering!

2.50 Animation Part 1

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Watch mfoxdogg's Blender 2.50 Tour 9 Part 2 (Animation) video



This tutorial is based on the Blender 2.5 Tour 9 (Animation) video, published by Michael Fox, aka mfoxdogg. Michael works closely with the Blender developers and has detailed knowledge of all the new features in 2.5. At my blog, at http://blender3dvideos.blogspot.com, is a link to his animation tutorial, as well as to his blog at blenderlabrat.blogspot.com. He has been doing Blender 2.5 tours for a while now, as evidenced by the fact that this is Tour 9. What's nice is that Michael also frequently contributes comments to my videos as well. If you have 2.5 questions, just email him or post a response to his comment.

I won't go into nearly as much detail as Michael does. My goal for this video is to give you a basic understanding of how animation in 2.5 works, and how it differs from 2.4x animation. For one thing, animation is much easier in 2.5. For another, you can animate just about anything in 2.5. In 2.4x there were many features that you could not animate. The developers completely rewrote, and significantly improved, the animation code in 2.5.

So start up Blender 2.5. I'm using the Alpha 0 version, which you can download from blender.org. We'll start with the default cube. Just as in 2.4x, with the cursor in the 3D window, you can press the I key to insert a keyframe. You can insert combinations of location, rotation, and scale keyframes. At Frame 1, insert a LocRotScale to insert location, rotation, and scale keyframes. The timeline window is right below the 3D window.

Move the timeline slider to Frame 50. Move the cube 3 or 4 blender units to the right (Right click to select, G to grab, then drag, then press ENTER). Scale the cube up 3 times (S - 3 - Enter). Rotate the cube 45 degrees (R - 45 - Enter). Insert a LocRotScale keyframe (press the I key, then select LocRotScale). Set the animation end frame to 50 by entering 50 in the End area. Press Alt-A to animate. Note how the cube grows, moves, and rotates from Frame 1 to Frame 50. Press ESC to stop the animation.

Alt-Shift-A behaves a bit differently from Blender 2.4x. If you press Alt-Shift-A, the animation goes backwards, from Frame 50 back to Frame 1. You can see the backwards animation in the timeline, as the slider goes backwards. In 2.4x Alt-Shift-A pleys the animation forward in all windows. In the VCR controls in the timeline, you see two arrows, a left pointing arrow and a right pointing arrow. The left pointing arrow plays the animation backwards, and the right pointing arrow plays the animation forwards.

Just as in 2.4x, you can animate material properties, such as diffuse color. In 2.4x, you had to go to the material context and press I to insert a keyframe. In 2.50, the material properties are grouped together in the materials panel. Let's change the diffuse color from red at frame 1 to green at frame 25 and blue at frame 40. First, go to the materials panel by clickinig on the grey ball icon. Then go to Frame 1 by setting the current frame number. A basic goal of Blender 2.5 is that anything that you see can be keyframed. The way to do that is to right click on a property and then select Insert Keyframe. Click on the Diffuse Color rectangle. Change it to a reddish color by selecting it in the color wheel. Right click on the rectangle and choose Insert Keyframes. Keyframes are inserted for the Red, Green, Blue, and Alpha channels.

Now go to Frame 25 by setting the Current Frame slider. Click on the Diffuse Color rectangle. Change the color to a greenish color. Right click on the diffuse color rectangle. Select Insert Keyframes.

Go to Frame 40 by setting the Current Frame slider. Click on te Diffuse Color rectangle. Change the color to something blue like. Right click on the diffuse color rectangle. Select Insert Keyframes. Now press Alt-A. Now the cube grows, moves, rotates, and changes color, based on the keyframes you have set.

You can add bunch of properties at a time, including properties you could not set in 2.4x. You do this by defining a keying set. Here's how it's done. We're going to change a group of properties related to specularity, the little spot that's reflected from the lamp. To do this, go to Frame 1, in the usual way. Right click on the Specular color rectangle. Click on Add Single To Keying Set. Then right click on the Specular Shader. Click Add Single to Keying Set. Right click on Hardness. Click Add Single to Keyiing Set. We've now defined properties related to specularity that we can keyframe all at once. At Frame 1, change Specular color to magenta, Shader to Phong, and Hardness to 255.
Click the little Key icon next to the word ButtonKeyingSet. This keyframes all those specular properties. Go to Frame 33. Change Specular color to yellow, Shader to Blinn, and Hardness to 3. Click the Key Icon next to the word ButtonKeyingSet. Keyframes are added at that point. If you press Alt-A, you might not see all the changes, but if you created an actual video, you would see it.

At this point, if you have worked in 2.4x with animation, you might be wondering where all these curves are kept and whether you can edit them in the IPO window. Well, I have news for you. The IPO Curve Editor is gone. Now you're probably even more confused. The IPO Curve Editor has been replaced by the Graph Editor. These curves are, after all, graphs. The graphs are grouped in a way that you really can edit them easily. The curves are grouped into action oriented curves (the location, rotation, and scale curves), and the Materials oriented curves. The Button Keying Set, when expanded, shows the curves related to specularity, that we defined in the keying set. If you collapse the Button Keying Set, you see the diffuse color curves.

How can you edit just one curve? By clicking on the eye icon, you can hide (or show) a particular curve. You can hide or show all the curves in a keying set by clicking on its eye icon. If you click enough eyes, you can get down to the particular curve you want to edit. By the way, these curves are now called F-curves. These curves are Bezier curves, just as in 2.4x. I'll discuss the Graph Editor, as well as the other visual editors related to animation, in Part 2 of the 2.5 Animation Tutorial.

I hope this gives you a leg up on how animation has changed in Blender 2.5. If you want to play with the Blend file I created, go to my blog related to this tutorial, at blender3dvideos.blogspot.com. Also, don't forget to press the Subscribe button on Youtube so you can find out how this 2.5 animation story ends. Happy Blendering!

Ray Mirror

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Ray tracing casts simulated rays of light on the scene and is on by default in Blender 2.49. Ray tracing gives the most realistic light properties in Blender, but the renders take the longest. That is why all of my renders in this video will be time lapsed. Don't expect the same rendering times as you see in this video, unless you work for Pixar or the Defense Department. For many animation and game engine applications, ray tracing rendering times are unacceptably slow. In other videos, we will discover alternatives, such as Z buffering, for which response times are more acceptable. However, the effects won't be as realistic as with ray mirror. In this video, we will be looking at a special type of ray tracing effect, ray mirror, which creates mirror reflections.

When a ray of light hits the surface of an object, one of three things can happen. The light can be absorbed by the object, the light can pass through the object (if the object has some transparency), or the light can be reflected back, which is what happens with a mirror. In reality, most objects have a combination of absorption, transparency, and reflective properties. Think of a blue light bulb. The light bulb looks blue because some of the light is absorbed by the material, glass or otherwise, to make it look blue. Perhaps you can see part of the inside of the light bulb, say if it is not frosted, such as the filament. That's because the light bulb has some transparent properties. Finally, if you can see part of the background through the light bulb, that's because of its mirror like, reflective properties. Ray Mirror controls this last property.

To show how Ray Mirror works, start up Blender and delete the default cube. Select the cube, press the Delete key and press Enter to confirm. Make sure you are in Top View by pressing Num7. Add a plane (Space - Add - Mesh - Plane). Scale the plane 5 times (S - 5 - Enter). The plane is going to act as a mirror. To make this happen, with the full Ray Mirror effect, press the Shading buttons (F5) and use the default material (Material). Click the Mirror Trans tab, then click the Ray Mirror button, and turn RayMir to 1. RayMir is a slider which goes from 0 to 1, representing 0% to 100% as a decimal number. Give the plane a red color (R=1, G=0, B=0).



Position the camera directly at the plane with View - Align View - Align Active Camera to View.

Go to Front View (Num1). Press the Home key to see all the objects, particularly, the camera. Duplicate the plane (Shift-D). Move the plane upwards, in the Z direction (press the G key and then the Z key), so that it is behind the camera. The duplicated plane has Ray Mirror on as well.

Go to the Scene buttons (F10). Make sure the Ray button is turned on, so that Ray Tracing is enabled.



Center the 3D cursor by pressing Shift-C. Add the monkey (Space - Add - Mesh - Monkey). Add a new material by pressing F5 (Shaders) and clicking the Add New button. Make Suzanne green (R=0, G=1, B=0). Move the monkey 1 blender unit to the right and up a bit. Go to Edit buttons (F9). Press the Set Smooth button. Add a Subsurf Level 2, Render Level 3.

Make sure you are in Object Mode. If not, press the tab key. Add a UV Sphere (Space - Add - Mesh - UVSphere). Give the UV Sphere a blue color by going to the Shaders panel (F5), adding a new material (Add New button) and setting R=0, G=0, and B=1. Move the UV Sphere 2 blender units to the left and up a bit, off the floor of the plane. Press F9 to go to the Edit buttons. Click the Set Smooth button to smooth out the UV Sphere.

Press F12 to render. The red mirror should show the mirroring of both the monkey and the UV Sphere, as the light bounces off the bottom mirror, sees the monkey and the UV Sphere, and then the objects are mirrored off the top mirror. The shadow obscures somewhat the mirrored effect.



Let's turn off shadows. Go to the Scene buttons (F10) and click off Shadow. Press F12 to render. Now you get the effect of both the top mirror and the bottom mirror.




The mirror effect can be combined with the color effect. Select either mirror plane (Right click). Press F5 to access the Shaders buttons. In the Ray Mirror group, turn Ray Mirror to 0. Press F12 to render. There is no mirror effect. The monkey and the UV Sphere both render, and the plane is red.



Now set Ray Mirror to .5, so we get half mirror and half color. Press F12 to render. Now the red base color shows through, but the mirror effect shows through as well. You can play with Ray Mirror to get the combination you like.



The mirror color can also play a role. Turn Ray Mirror back to 1 so we get the full ray mirror effect. Now let's set the mirror color to yellow. Select the Mirror color rectangle, and change it to Yellow (R=1, G=1, B=0). Press F12 to render. We get a really interestng result. The yellow mirror color mixes with the material's color. The monkey is green. Yellow already has green. So the mirrored monkey remains green. However, the sphere is blue. The mirror color, yellow, has no blue, so the mirrored UV sphere is yellow. By the way, there's also a blending with the sky color, which is also mirrored, which accounts for the color variation outside the mirror boundary.



The Depth setting controls how many times the mirror effect bouncing is produced. Let's crank up the depth to 5 and press F12 to render. There are now more mirrored monkeys and UV Spheres.



The Fresnel setting produces another interesting effect, mixing the mirror color, and the mirror's diffuse color. Let's crank Fresnel to 1.5 and render.



The Glossiness setting affects the blurriness of the reflection. The default of 100% glossiness produces a crisp reflection. A little bit of reduction goes a long way in increasing the realism of the render. Set glossiness to .9 (90%) and you'll get an effect that simulates a bit of dirt in the mirror.



There's more. How about turning on Ray Mirror for the monkey and the UV Sphere. Select the monkey. Go to the Shading buttons (F5). Click the Ray Mirror button. Turn RayMir to 1. Then select the UVSphere, go to the shading buttons, and turn on Ray Mirror, setting it to 1. Press F12 to render. How about changing the mirror's shape? Subdivide the plane, rotate a few vertices, and render. I'll leave that to you.




As you can see, there are a lot of neat effects you can achieve with Ray Mirror. I hope you have the basis for experimenting more and getting the effect you desire. Happy Blendering!

Multiple Materials

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Many times you will be assigning one material to an entire object. However, there are situations where you want to assign different parts of an object to their own material. The assignment can get kind of tricky. In this demo, we will make each face of a cube have a different colored material. You can then extend this to customize each material, such as changing its opacity or transparency, on each face. You can also add separate textures to each material. This tutorial shows you how to do the first step: creating a separate material for each face of a cube.

Steps:
1) We'll start with the default 2.49b scene and use the default cube. Press Tab to go to Edit mode. Go to Face Select mode (Control - Tab - 3 or the triangle icon. Press A to deselect all faces. Rotate the cube on its side, to make selecting a face easier. Press Z to go to wireframe mode.

Materials are assigned per face. Each face can have only 1 material ID. New materials are given the next material ID, 2 for the second one, 3 for the third one, and so on. A set of buttons in Edit (F9( assigns multiple material IDs. By default, when you Add New material, all faces have a Material ID 1. Press F5 for the shading buttons. There's an indicator (1 Mat 1) that shows how many materials are on the object (1), and which one we're working on (1).

2) Create 5 new materials. By default, each face of the cube has a material, called Material, assigned to it. The Material button group shows that there is 1 material assigned to the cube. Press F9 to get to the Editing buttons. Press the New key 5 times. Now there are 6 materials, with the names Material, Material.001, Material.002, all the way to Material.005.

3) Assign the faces to their respective materials:
Go to F9 (Editing buttons). Assign the faces as follows:
Select the top face. Set its material to Material (ID = 1). Click Assign.
Select the bottom face. Set its material to Material.001 (ID = 2). Click Assign.
Select the left face. Set its material to Material.002 (ID = 3) Click Assign.
Select the right face. Set its material to Material.003 (ID=4). Click Assign.
Select the front face. Set its material to Material.004 (ID = 5). Click Assign.
Select the back face. Set its material to Material.005 (ID=6). Click Assign.

You can verify which material is associated with which face. Press the A key to deselect all faces. Select a material, say Material.004. Click the Select button and you should see that the material is assigned to the top face. You can also do the opposite. Press A to deselect all faces. Click the bottom face. Click the question mark icon. You should see that Material.001, with material ID 2, is assigned.

4) Click F5 to go to the Shading buttons. We want our materials to have meaningful names so we can identify them easily. Assign the following colors:
Material: Red (R=1, G=0, B=0). Press Autoname to have Blender create a meaningful name (Red).
Material.001: Green (R=0, G=1, B=0). Press Autoname. Blender calls this LightGreen.
Material.002: Blue (R=0, G=0, B=1). Press Autoname. Blender calls this LightBlue.
Material.003: Yellow (R=1, G=1, B=0). Press Autoname. Blender calls this material Yellow.
Material.004: Magenta (R=1, G=0, B=1). Press Autoname. Blender calls this material Magenta.
Material.005: Cyan (R=0, G=1, B=1). Press Autoname. Blender calls this material Cyan.

To view our result, press Tab to go into Object mode. Then go into Shaded mode. Rotate the cube. Press F12 to render.

You can further refine this by changing the characteristics of a material by playing with settings such as Ray Mirror, Alpha, Ray Transparency, the render pipeline, and so on. You can produce some interesting effects. Happy Blendering.

Rip Tool

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The Rip tool lets you tear out a hole, such as a mouth or an eye socket if you're modeling a face, in your mesh. You can use the Rip Tool in either vertex select or edge select mode. The Rip Tool does not work in Face Select Mode. You can also use the Rip tool to do split apart a mesh, for example, splitting a sphere into two halves. You can create faces to join the parts of the mesh that you have ripped. The goal of this tutorial is to make you comfortable both ripping a mesh apart to create holes where you want them, and to join mesh parts together again.

We'll start with the default Blender 2.49b scene. Delete the default cube (press the Delete key and press Enter to confirm). Add a plane (Space - Add - Mesh - Plane). The plane is in Object mmode. Scale the plane to 4 times its original size (S - 4 - Enter). Get rid of the 3D Transform Manipulator to make the demonstration of the Rip Tool easier to follow.

Press Tab to go into Edit mode. Press the Edit buttons (F9) and click the Subdivide button 3 times. Press the A key to deselect all vertices.

Look at the indicators for vertices, edges, and faces. Right now, the plane has 81 vertices, 144 edges, and 64 faces. The zeroes show that nothing is selected.

Make sure you are in Vertex Select Mode (Control - Tab - 1) or the Vertex Select icon. Position the 3D cursor below and to the right of the vertex you want to select. Select the vertex, then press the V key, grabbing the vertex to the right. A hole is created to the right of the vertex. Look at the indicators for vertices, edges, and faces. Before the plane had 81 vertices, of which none were selected. Now, the plane has 82 vertices, and one is selected.

This gives a clue as to what the Rip tool actually does. It creates a duplicate vertex at the same spot as the selected vertex, connected to the vertices as the copied vertex. When the mesh is ripped, that vertex drags the adjacent edges with it. The 3D cursor position determines the direction of the rip.

Press Alt-U, which brings up the Undo History. Click on Select to undo the rip. Now we're back to having the vertex selected, with 81 vertices altgether. Move the cursor above and to the left of the selected vertex. You can constrain the rip to an axis. To do that, press the V key, and then the Y key to constrain the rip to the Y axis. Press Enter to confirm. So you can see that the direction of the rip depends on the position of the 3D cursor at the time that you press the V key. The rip is along the edge that is closest to the selected vertex.

Press the A key to deselect the vertex. Go to another part of the plane, and select a vertex. Then Shift select (Shift - Right Click) the vertex immediately to the right of it. Position the 3D cursor above and in the middle of the selected vertices. Press the V key. You now get a bigger rip, a trapezoid, with 2 vertices on top and 4 vertices on the bottom. So a rip with N selected vertices produces a ripped polygon with N vertices in the ripped direction and N+2 vertices in the original direction.

If you start the Rip and then immediately decide not to continue, the new vertices still remain. To illustrate this, select a vertex, press the V key, and then press Esc. The vertex created by the Rip tool is still there. You can rip the mesh now even though you pressed Esc. Press the G key and move the vertex and the mesh is ripped. Press Enter to confirm.

Press the A key to deselect all vertices. Suppose you want to patch up the hole that you created. The solution is to select the vertices for the new face (3 or 4) and press the F key. To illustrate this, select the 4 vertices that form the square of the hole created from 2 selected vertices. Press the F key. A face is created.

Press the A key to deselect all vertices. Now we'll create triangular faces for the remaining two holes. Select the 3 vertices forming the left triangle, and press F. Press the A key to deselect everything. Select the 3 vertices forming the right triangle, and press F. The hole is now repaired. Press the A key to deselect.

Ripping via an edge loop is a great way to split a mesh. Select an Edge Loop by positioning the 3D cursor on an edge and pressing Alt-Right Click. Then press the V key and scroll down. Press Enter to confirm. You have now split the mesh along the edge loop.

Rip works in edge mode as well. Go into Edge mode, by either selecting the Edge icon or pressing Control - Tab - 2. Position the 3D cursor above an edge to select. Select the edge (Right Click on an edge). Press the V key. The rip works just like selecting two adjacent vertices, which is, of course, what constitutes an edge.

Press the A key to deselect everything. You rip on two edges along the same loop. Select an unselected edge. Then Shift Select (right click while holding the Shift key) to select the edge next to it. Press the V key. The rip works in the trapezoidal fashion you would expect.

Rip works on other meshes as well. Let's look at a UV Sphere. Press tab to go to object mode. Click the second square to go to Level 2, so we have a blank 3D viewport. Add a UV Sphere (Space - Add - Mesh -UVSphere), accepting the default of 32 rings and 32 segments. Press Z to go into wireframe mode. Scale the UVSphere 3 times (S - 3 - Enter). Press Tab to go into Edit mode. Go into Edge select mode (Control - Tab - 2). Press the A key to deselect everything.

Press Num 1 key to go to front view. Position the cursor on an edge and press Alt-Right Click to select an edge loop. Position the 3D cursor below the selected loop. Press the V key. Move the selected edge loop down. Behold, you have split the UV Sphere. Press Z to go into solid mode so you can see.

Ycu can also rip and scale at the same time. Select another edge loop (Alt- Right Click) for splitting the UV Sphere. Position the 3D cursor below the loop. Press the V key, then the Z key to constrain along the Z axis, drag the edge down. Press Enter. Then press the S key to scale the loop.

I hope this gives you a good idea of the Rip tool, which is very handy for creating holes in a mesh. Happy Blendering!

2.49b Edge and Face Loops

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You can select the subcomponents of a mesh by either right clicking, or shift right click, or the B key to box select, or the B key twice to form a circle selection, or alt left click for lasso select. There's another way to select parts of a mesh, which is by selecting a loop of vertices, edges, or faces. Also, adding loops is a great way to add detail to your mesh. Instead of subdividing a mesh, which adds a lot of extra geometry when it's not needed, adding loops only in the area where you want detail will create a cleaner mesh with fewer edges, vertices, and faces. The aim of this tutorial is to demonstrate how to use loops both to select parts of your mesh and to add details to it.

Selecting By Loops

We'll work with the default cube. It's selected and in Object Mode. Go to the Edit buttons (F9) and press Tab to go into Edit mode. Press the Subdivide button, in the Mesh Tools panel, three times. Rotate the view, using either the middle mouse button or alt-Left Mouse Button if you enabled Emulate 3 Button Mouse in the Preferences window. We're in Vertex Select mode. Position the 3D Cursor at one of the corner vertices. Hold the Alt key down and press the Right Mouse button. Doing that, selects not just the vertex (which is what Right Mouse button does just by itself), but the entire edge that the vertex belongs to.



Press the A key to deselect the vertices.

Now hold the Alt key down and select a vertex that is not on the outside edge but instead is inside the cube. This time, an entire loop of edges is selected - the loop that that vertex belongs to. The loop could be horizontal or vertical.



Press the A key to deselect everything. You can also select the perpendicular range of faces to which the edge belongs by holding both the Control key and the Alt key at the same time. To illustrate, press the Control key and the Alt key at the same time, and select a vertex. What is selected is the faces on the edge perpendicular to the vertex.



You can add to the loop selection, in effect selecting multiple loops, by holding the Shift Key down as well as the Alt Key. Hold the both the Alt and Shift keys and select an unselected vertex. Now you have selected two loops. If the loop includes all the vertices that form a face, those faces will be selected as well.



If you feel particularly ambidexterous, try holding the Control, Alt, and Shift keys down at the same time, and select another vertex. You then add to the faces selected before.

Loop selection works in edge select mode as well. Holding the Alt key and then clicking the right mouse button selects the loop to which the edge belongs to. Press the A key to deselect everything. If we go into Face Select mode, we see that loops of faces can also be selected this way. Hold the Alt kay, and with the 3D cursor on a face, press the right mouse button to select a face loop. Hold both the Shift key and the Alt key, select an unselected face with the right mouse button, and the loop in which the selected face belongs is added to the selection.



Selecting loops of vertices, edges, or faces, can make the selection process much more precise than box selection or selection of individual vertices, edges, or faces.

Creating Loops On A Cube

You can add edge loops with the Loop Subdivide tool (Control-R). To illustrate, position the cursor on an edge of the cube, and press Control-R. A magenta square shows where the new loop will be cut. However, you actually have more control over where the loop cut will occur. Press Enter.



Now you see both the proposed new loop, and a green line, which is the edge along which you can slide this loop. This is called "edge slide mode". A green line, showing the edge along which the loop can be cut, displays. You can scroll the edge up and down along the green line. Press Enter when you get to the position of the new edge that you want.

You can create more than one edge loop at a time. Position the cursor at an edge along where you would like to cut and press Control-R. Now, instead of pressing Enter, press the + key on the numeric keypad. This adds a loop cut, allowing you to create two loop cuts at a time. You can press the + key on the numeric keypad to add another loop cut, or you can press the - key on the numeric keypad to subtract 1 loop cut. Then press Enter. Edge Slide mode does not work when you create more than one edge loop. Instead, the loops are split evenly along the edge.



Creating Loops On A UV Sphere

Let's start with the default scene by selecting Load Factory Settings from the menu. Delete the default cube (press the Delete key, then press OK to accept the delete). Add a UV Sphere (Space - Add - Mesh - UVSphere), accepting the default settings of 32 rings and 32 segments. Press Tab to go into Edit Mode. Press A to deselect everything. Press Control-R. You can create edge loops either based on rings (going left and right) or segments (going up and down). Lets add an edge loop based on a ring. Press Control-R, selecting a horizontal edge loop to create. This selection works the same way as for a cube. Press Enter, to go into Edge Slide mode. Position the loop where you want and press Enter. However, for a ring, the edge loop only is created on half the UV Sphere. Press Control-R, then Enter. Slide the edge where you want it. Then press Enter. Rotate the UV Sphere and you will see the result. To get the edge loop to go around the UV Sphere, you will need to create the corresponding edge loop on the other side of the sphere.




You can add more than one loop cut using the + key on the numeric keypad, and subtract using the - key on the numeric keypad, as with the cube.

Control - Alt - Right Click and Shift - Control- Alt - Right Click work the same way on a UV Sphere as on a cube. You can create a loop of faces perpendicular to the edge you select with Control - Alt Right Click, and extend the selection if you somehow manage to hold Shift, Control, Alt, and Right Click while the 3D cursor is on an unselected face.

As you can see, selecting and adding loops can make your mesh modeling more precise when you're adding detail. These techniques work on any mesh, not just the cube or UV Sphere. Try them with a torus, or with Suzanne, and you should get the hang of loop selection and addition quickly. Happy Blendering!

2.50 Alpha 0 Tools Menu

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November 24, 2009 marks a milestone for all Blender users because it is the release date of Blender 2.5 Alpha 0. While there is still much work to do, the release of Alpha 0 means that Blender 2.5 is formally open for user comments, testing, and feedback, at Blender Foundation's blender.org site.

You can download Alpha 0 from Blender.org.

You should also read the Alpha 0 Release Notes. These give us a much clearer path of where Blender 2.5 is headed.

Some time ago, I did a Blender 2.5 Sneak Preview Video, based on a pre-alpha version of 2.5. Although much of what I discussed is still valid, Blender 2.5 has evolved since then. Also, my understanding of certain features is clearer now than it was 2 months ago. So I thought it would be a good time to revisit, highlighting the new ways of doing things. This tutorial focuses on a particularly interesting new feature, the Tool Shelf, which reorganizes access to Blender tools into one menu.



Before we start on the Tool Menu, note that the Startup Screen has a window with links to places where we can get the latest information about Blender 2.5 - the Release Log, the Manual, the Blender.org Web site, the user community, and the Python API reference. For example, clicking the Manual link opens up a browser window with the Blender 2.5 manual, which is a wiki. I encourage you to check these links out because Blender 2.5 is developing rapidly and you don't want to miss out on the newest goodies.

You get rid of this initial splash screen by left clicking on it. In Blender 2.5, the default scene still consists of the cube, camera, and lamp objects. The Tool Menu, what we're going to focus on, is the menu at the left side.



There are actually three sections to the menu. The top most section, the Tool Shelf, initially contains no tools. Its purpose is to give you the flexibility of adding your favorite tools, available from the click of a button. You can add a tool by clicking the Add Tool button. A list of tools displays. You can select one of those, but actually the best way to add a tool is to search for it. Let's suppose you want to save your .blend file frequently and want a button to do that. Instead of scrolling down the list of choices - there are a lot of them because it's all the possible things you can do in Blender - go to the search box (the box with the magnifying glass icon), and type the word Save. You get a list of all the Blender tools with the word Save in it. Choose Save Blender File. Now you can save the file with the click of a button. You can add as many buttons as you want to the Tool Shelf. Maybe you also append objects from libraries often. You can add the Link/Append From Library button. You can easily customize the Tool Shelf to include all the things you do in Blender frequently, without having to wade through a maze of buttons, and panels.



The next group of tool menus actually changes depending on what mode you are in. Blender starts up, as it did before, with the default cube selected and in Object Mode. Since Object Mode is selected, the tools available in Object Mode, such as Translate, Rotating, and Scaling, Smoothing, and Inserting Keyframes, display. To show how these choices change, press the Tab key to go into Edit Mode. Note that the indicator shows that edit mode is active. The tools that are applicable to meshes, such as Extrude, Subdivide, Loop Cut, as well as Translate, Rotate, and Scale, now display.

Click Tab again to go back to Object Mode. Note that the Object tools are available again. To demonstrate the bottom part of the Tool Menu, let's scale the cube up, to 3 times its original size. We're going to try to do it through the GUI but will not be successful. What would have happened in Blender 2.4x is that you would have to bring up the Transform Properties menu and change the size. This means you would have had to know about that menu. In 2.5, the options for Resize automatically display at the bottom of the Tool Menu. You can resize by changing the values there. Also, you can scroll down to get all the options available when resizing.

Now let's duplicate the cube. Press the Duplicate key. Just like Shift-D, which still works, the cube is duplicated. Move the new cube away from the old cube to see. Note that the bottom right part of the Tool Menu changed to show the options for duplicating an object. By changing the options, say to make a linked duplicate, you chane how Duplicate works. This gives you immediate visual feedback.

Another neat feature is Repeat Last. Click on Repeat Last. The last operation - in this case the duplication - is repeated. Move the new cube away from the old cube and you can see it. Repeat Last works for most operations. If you're doing some operation, like extruding or scaling, or creating edge loops, a number of times, you can save a lot of time by clicking on Repeat Last.

You can see the tools available in other modes by switching mode. Sculpt Mode, for example, shows the various brushes and settings for each type of sculpting. Weight Paint shows the Weight Paint tools. Vertex Paint shows the vertex paint tools, and so on. The specific options for each tool are on the Tool Menu, at your fingertips. This should help make your workflow more efficient.



Another powerful addition in 2.5 is that the shortcuts are totally configurable. Go to the User Preferences and select the Input panel, which is selected by default. If you wanted Save File to be something other than Ctrl-W, first click the Edit button to make the keys editable. Then, find where Save File is stored. Expand the choice by clicking on the left arrow. You can change the keypress to something else, say, Control-Shift-W. You can do this for other functions. If you want these changes to be permanent, click the Save As Default button. Otherwise, the changes will be lost when you exit Blender. You can also save your key maps. The idea is that, if you use another modeling package, such as Maya, you can map the operations you used there into Blender.

I hope this gives you a taste of the new Tool Menu in Blender 2.5 alpha 0. Although everything is subject to change, something this fundamental is likely to be around when Blender 2.5 is finally released into production.

2.49b Vector Blur

Vector blur is a great way to add realism to your animation. Your eye naturally sees moving objects moving as a blur, because that is how your brain processes the motion. Without some sort of blurring, animated moving objects don't look as if they are realistically moving. Blender's animations are by default rendered as a sequence of perfectly still images. This is unrealistic, since fast moving objects do appear to be 'moving', that is, blurred by their own motion, both in a movie frame and in a photograph from a 'real world camera'.

To obtain such a blurring effect with moving objects, Blender can be made to render the current frame and some more frames, in between the real frames, and merge them all together to obtain an image where fast moving details are 'blurred'. The goal of this tutorial is to demonstrate how to blur moving objects in Blender.

First, we'll create a simple animation. We will animate the movement of the cube across the screen, over 50 frames. With an animation speed of 25 frames per second, that produces a 2 second video, one second going across the screen, the other second going back.

1) Go to the SR-1: Animation view.
2) Press the N key to bring up the Transform Properties window. Set the X location to -7, the Y location to 0, and the Z location to 0.
3) At Frame 1, press the I key and insert a Location key frame.
4) Go to Frame 25. Set the X location to 4, the Y location to 0, and the Z location to 0.
5) Press the I key and insert a Location key frame.
6) Go to Frame 50. Set the X location to -7, the Y location to 0, and the Z location to 0.
7) Press the I key and insert a Location key frame.

8) Go to the Scene buttons (F10), and set the animation to 50 frames.
9) In the Format panel, set the animation type to your favorite. I used the compressed AVI format with the CamStudio Lossless Codec, version 1.4, for compression.
The video will be created in the Output directory (/tmp by default), with a filename of 0001_0050.avi. Set the output directory to the folder where you want the video to be saved. If you chose a QuickTime movie, the filename would be 0001_0050.mov.

10) Hit the ANIM button. I will pause the video while the animation is being rendered, as I will do for the other animations in this video. The render took 1 minute, 10 seconds.

The animation does indeed have the cube move back and forth, but the motion of the cube is not realistic. The cube just moves in a straight line uniformly, without the blurring effect of motion.

With the help of the Node editor, we can introduce vector blur to this animation and compare. To do this,

1) Go to the Render Layers tab of the Scene button. Vector blur takes a special Vector (VEC) rendering pass, which is not rendered by default. Find the VEC button and enable it. Vector Blur requires the COMBINED, Z, and VEC passes. The others you may need to render the scene exactly as you need it.

2) Change the 3D view to the Node Editor. Press Control-Down Arrow to maximize te Node Editor. Click on the face, for composite nodes. Then click the USE NODES button. There are two default nodes, the input node (Render Layers) is the scene as rendered without compositing. The other node, the Composite node, is the final result of the compositing process.

3) Move the Composite Node all the way to the right, to make room for the Vector Blur.

4) Add the Vector Blur filter (Space - Add - Filter - Vector Blur). Accept the defaults. Connect the Image socket of the Render Layer to the Image input of the Vector Blur node. Connect the Z socket of the Render Layer node to the Z socket of the Vector Blur node. The Z socket stores the Z information - the distance of the cube from the camera. Connect the Speed socket of the Render Layer node to the Speed socket of the Vector Blur node. The Speed socket is really the key to blurring the cube's movement. You can play with the defaults. Increasing the number of samples, for example, makes the vector blur more realistic but slows down the rendering. Also, you can control which moving objects are blurred. A speeding sports car should be blurred, but bystanders should not.

5) Connect the Image output socket of the Vector Blur node with the Image socket of the Composite node.

The noodle (the node setup) is complete. Go back to the Scene buttons and click the Do Composite button. Press the Render button. Look at Frame 1. The monkey is blurred.

6) Time to animate. Click the ANIM button. Pause until the 50 frames are rendered. The render took 1 minute, 47 seconds.
Now you see the cube blurred while it is moving --- a much more realistic animation. Think of a fast sports car speeding by you.

Blender has another way to implement blurring a moving object: the Motion Blur option. To demonstrate that, click the MBLUR button in the Scene panel. Turn off Do Composite because motion blur doesn't rely on nodes. MBLUR is very slow because it renders each frame up to 16 times. The number of samples is controlled by the OSA setting, which is 8 on my computer. Eight renders per frame is mighty slow. The renderer calculates the position of each object and then averages the positions out. It is more accurate than Vector Blur, but at the cost of a LOT of time. Here is the cube animation with motion blur.

To summarize, Blender provides you with two options, Vector Blur and Motion Blur, for making your moving object look more realistically blurred as the object moves in the scene. For most applications, especially in the Game Engine, Vector Blur will work well. Happy Blendering!

Blender Python 1: Setup

In addition to everything else, Blender is a programming environment, with Python its language of choice. Even if you don't plan on creating Python scripts in Blender, you should understand the Python environment. Python is how Blender talks to you. The purpose of this tutorial is to introduce you to Blender's Python environment. Understanding this environment should help you understand how Blender works as well. Of course, if you want to write Python scripts to make Blender behave exactly how you want, becoming familiar with the Blender Python environment is the first step. Even if you don't program, just understanding how to run a script will allow you to run Python programs, called scripts, written by others. For starters, go to the Blender Python Scripts Catalog.

Did you ever wonder what the purpose of the first window, and what the message:


Compiled with Python 2.6.2
Checking for installed Python... got it!


means? Does it have anything to do with big, poisonous snakes?

No. That first window is Blender's Python console. That message, which is what you should see as well, means that Blender found a good Python installation on your computer and that it could run Python programs. Blender also reports the Python version it found. You should, in general, go with the latest, most stable release of Python, which you can find at:

http://www.python.org

Python programs, incidentally, are called scripts and have the same meaning scripts have in the theatre. They're instructions for Blender. Blender uses Python scripts everywhere - to create objects, to move objects around in a scene, to animate objects, to add materials and textures, and so on.

Blender has two windows that were designed for interacting with Python. The Scripts window, the one with the snake icon, was designed to run Python scripts. The scripts are grouped into areas such as Mesh, Object, and UV. To run a script, select it from the menu. One commonly used script is to save the UV Face Layout to a file, for use with an image editor such as The Gimp or Photoshop. When you run the script, a screen with options for the UV image file displays. You can accept the defaults, or change them, and then press OK. The script will then run, asking you where you want to create the face layout file.

Blender has a built in Scripting setup, which works well if you want to create Python scripts in Blender. To access this window, go to the SR:5-Scripting view, which you can select from the dropdown menu. There are three windows: the 3D viewport, on the left; the Buttons Window, with the Scripts area highlighted, at the bottom; and the Text window at the right.

You have probably downloaded blend files with notes in the Text window. That's a great use for the text window. Another is to write Python scripts for Blender. Let's write our first Python script, a message to the Blender console announcing our presence. Type:


print "Ira was here."


in the Text window.

To run a script, you can either press Alt-P, or from the Text Menu, select Run Python Script. Press Alt-P. Seemingly, nothing happened. Blender is strangely silent if things go OK. Actually, the script run. To see the result, go to the Blender console, and the message "Ira was here." displays.

Blender will, however, tell you when you have made a programming error. Let's introduce an error. Text needs to be enclosed on each side by double quotes. Delete the last double quote. Press Alt-P. You get the following message:


Error: Python Script Error
Check console


Now that you have gotten this far, you know where to look. Click on the console window. You get the message:


SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal
File "Text" Line 1


and it shows you where it thought the error was. Actually, the error isn't quite where the message is pointing, but you have to give Blender a gold star for trying to be helpful.

Go back to the text window, add the double quote back, press alt-P, and check the console window. Everything is OK again.

Here are some formatting tips. Press the computer window icon. This makes the text window full screen. If your script is large, it's easier to have the window full screen so you won't have to scroll up and down as much. To return to the text window's original size, press the computer window icon (the screen is divided into 4 parts).

The next button displays line numbers along with the code. This can be very handy, especially considering that Blender's error messages give you the line number. Line numbers make it easier for you to get to a particular line.

The next window enables word wrap. Generally you don't want that button enabled when you are writing a script, although it is handy if you are writing notes or free form text in the window.

The "AB" button enables syntax highlighting. This is useful in coding to give you hints as to the proper syntax of a line of code.

The snake button enables Python text plugins. Text plugins can give the Text editor more power. You can find text plugins by going to the Text menu and selecting Text Plugins.

The Screen dropdown lets you change the font size. The code currently displays with a font size of 12. You can change it to 15 by selecting 15. Your choices depend on the fonts installed on your computer.

The Tab: selector lets you change the number of spaces that the editor inserts when you press the Tab key. Python syntax checks based on having the code properly tabbed. Making the indent larger helps the readability of the code as well. You can add a tab by placing the cursor at the beginning of the line and selecting Indent from the Format menu. You can also unindent.

Highlight the line "Ira was here". You can comment it out by selecting Comment from the Format menu. Commenting a line of code means that the code will not execute, i.e., run. To show this, press Alt-P to run the program. The message does not display on the console. You can uncomment by selecting Uncomment from the Format menu. Press Alt-P to run the program again. This time the message displays on the console.

You can create more than one script in a blend file. To do this, click the ADD NEW button. A new, blank text window, titled TEXT.001, displays. Enter a line of code


print "Message from Outer Space"


Press Alt-P and check the console. The message displays.

If you save the blend file (Control-W), all the text windows are saved. You can also save individual text windows by selecting the Save button from the Text window, or pressing Alt-S. Python files should be saved with an extension of .py.

I hope this gives you a good level of comfort with Blender's Python programming environment. I plan to do more tutorials on how to use Python in Blender. There is a lot to cover, much more than can be done in a 10 minute video. Happy Blending!

2.49b Realistic Bouncing Ball

Download the Bouncing Ball blend file





At first glance, one might think that animating a bouncing ball would be easy, a simple matter of moving a sphere and adding location keyframes. Sure, the ball would move. However, it would not bounce realistically. Because of gravity, the ball moves slower at the top than at the bottom. The ball actually is stretched a bit in the middle of the bounce and squashes when it hits the floor. Because of friction, the height of the next bounce is less than the height of the previous bounce. The spin of the ball must be realistic as well.

We're not going to address all these things. The purpose of this tutorial, which is based on the Blender 3D Noob To Pro bouncing ball tutorial, is to show the basics of animating a bouncing ball, including squashing the ball using lattice deformation and how to use IPO curves to bounce the ball a number of times without redoing the first bounce sequence again and again. I used Blender 2.49B.

We'll start by deleting the default cube (Right click, pressing the X key, and confirming the delete). Then add a UV Sphere (Space-Add-Mesh-UVSphere), accepting the default settings of 32 rings and 32 segments. From the editing buttons (F9), press Set Smooth. Then add a subsurf modifier at level 2. This gives us a nice round ball.



Press Num1 to go into Front View. Add a Lattice (Space-Add-Lattice). Press Z to go into wireframe mode. Select the lattice. Scale the lattice so that the UV Sphere is inside of it, with the sides of the lattice touching the sides of the sphere.



To make the lattice control the sphere, select the sphere, then Shift Select the lattice. Press Control-P and choose the Lattice Deform option to make the lattice the parent of the sphere. Select the UV Sphere and press F9. Look at the modifier stack. You should see the phrase "Lattice parent deform" at the top of the stack. This means that the lattice modifier was applied correctly. To test this, select the lattice and scale or move it. The sphere mesh should scale or move as well. We'll use the lattice later to squash the ball. The Make Real button would make the lattice permanently control the ball. We can ignore this button for this simple tutorial.

Now it's time to animate the ball. To do this, switch to Scene SR:1-Animation. This built in scene setup has all the windows we need for animation - the Outline Window, the 3D viewport of course, the IPO window, which we'll use later, and the buttons window.




Position the 3D cursor in the 3D viewport and press Num1 to go to Front View. The blue Z arrow should point upwards. We're going to animate the first bounce over 23 frames, which is about 1 second assuming a standard movie speed of 24 frames per second. Press F10 to go to the Scene buttons, and set the end frame to 23.
It's time to insert key frames. Note that we are animating the lattice, not the ball.

Make sure we're in Frame 1. If not, press Shift-Left Arrow or enter the number 1 in the Frame Number area. We start the animation when the ball is at the top of its bounce. Press the G key, then the Z key, to move the lattice up in the Z direction, about 7 blender units or so, to the top of the bounce.

Press the I key and set a key for LocRotScale. Note how there are now 9 curves in the IPO window, for location, rotation, and scale, in the X, Y, and Z direction. You get 3 curves for each, for X, Y, and Z.

Go to Frame 11. Press the G key, then the Z key. Mgzove the lattice down in the Z direction, to 1 Blender unit above the ground. This is where the ball will be squashed a bit. Press the I key and insert a LocRotScale key.

Go to Frame 13. Leave the Lattice in the same position and insert another LocRotScale key.

Go to Frame 23. Move the Lattice back to its position at Frame 1 by pressing the G key, then the Z key, then moving it back to 7 Blender Units up. In real life, the ball should move back somewhat less than that, because of friction, but for this tutorial, where the ball will just bounce forever, we can ignore this. Press I and insert a LocRotScale key.




We have animated the basic bounce. On Frame 12, we will squash the ball. Go to Frame 12. Place the cursor at the base of the lattice. Set the Pivot point to 3d Cursor. Scale the ball on the Z axis by pressing the S key and then the Z key. Press I to insert a LocRotScale key.



In IPO window, move the Green vertical bar back and forth to scrub the animation. We have now animated both the bounce and the squash. Pressing Alt A will also do the animation of the bounce forever. Press Esc to stop the animation.

The reason the ball bounces forever is that the animation is 23 frames long, exactly as long as the ball bounce. That's a coincidence. To demonstrate this, change the animation length to 250 frames. and press Alt A. Now the ball bounces and just stays there from frame 24 to 250 instead of bouncing. Suppose we want the ball to bounce forever no matter how long the animation. To do that, go to the IPO window. Press A to select all the curves. From the Curve Menu, select Extend Mode and select Cyclic. When you replay the animation, Alt A, the ball bounces for the entire animation.

There's plenty more tweaking that can be done to this basic animation. You can add materials and textures to the ball. You can play with the IPO curves to control how the ball moves, stretches, and contracts. I hope this gets you started. Happy blending.