animation Blender 3D Basics: The Getting Started Guide

February 4, 2016

HOMEPAGE: Blender is free to use for any purpose.

Free to Use. Free to Change. Free to Share. Free to Sell Your Work. Blender is FREE SOFTWARE.

The Blender Guide

• Blender 3D Basics: The Getting Started Guide
• Blender 3D Materials and Textures Basics
• Blender 3D Lighting and Rendering Basics
• Blender 3D Advanced Modelling
• Blender 3D Animation Basics
• Mastering 3D Rendering in Blender
• Mastering 3D Lighting in Blender
• Master HDR Environment Lighting in Blender 3D
• Mastering Blender 3D Textures with UV Mapping

A beginners’ guide to building objects in 3D with Blender – the free cross-platform 3D graphics and video software. We cover orienting yourself in the interface plus simple modelling.

Obviously, there is a lot more to Blender, but this simple 101 type introduction will enable you to get a grasp of the basics, and you will be able to at the very least build a simple object in this bafflingly complex software.

Puzzling Interface

If you have no 3D graphics experience, then opening Blender can be daunting. There is a cube, a camera and a light. That’s it. Around this elementary view is a LOT of controls and numbers, looking less like a graphics program and more like the flight deck of an Airbus.

The process of building simple objects is actually quite easy, but what you are supposed to do is not obvious just by looking at the interface.

The first thing you need to do is figure out what the mouse does. Unlike most other apps, in Blender you select with the right mouse button. You move by clicking and holding with the right mouse button. If you click the left mouse button, your move is usually completed. If you click the right mouse button, your move will be undone.

Congratulations. You just mastered the most difficult thing to understand in this tutorial.

Making a Shape

The grey window with the grid in it is your movie studio. You model, animate and render in this window.

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Select the cube with the right mouse button. Press the Delete key. You will be prompted to delete the object and should click OK.

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You only need a camera if you are going to render a picture. We are only going to model, so get rid of the camera, too. Select the camera the same way. Press the Delete key. Once again, you will be prompted to delete the camera, and you should click OK. (See a theme developing? Every time you delete, you will be asked to confirm.)

Select the light and delete it. Incidentally, confirming delete usually only requires that you press the return key.

Now that you have a clean area to work in, you can start modelling. While you can just make a bunch of shapes and bolt them together, it’s much better if you can make the basic shape of the object you are modelling from one mesh. It renders better and looks better that way.

Let’s make a really basic organic shape. Press “Shift + A” to open the floating menu. Select “Mesh -> UV Sphere.”

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To zoom in and out of the view, use the scroll wheel in the center of your mouse. To rotate the view around, press down on the scroll wheel (which usually functions as a third mouse button) and move the mouse. To get different views of the object, press the numbers on the numeric keypad (or choose the view menu from the bottom of the screen which also shows you the keys to press).

Select the sphere you made with the right mouse button. Click the Modifiers tab on the right hand panel, click “Add Modifier” and “Add Subdivision Surface modifier.”

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Crank the subdivisions up to 6 for view and render. If memory becomes an issue, you can always view 3 and render 6, and that way you will see a fast low-res version of the effect on screen, but it will render much smoothly.

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Subdivision will smooth out the mesh and use subsurfaces rather than the polygons of the sphere, making for a smooth organic model.

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Click the Tab key, entering edit mode for the currently selected object.

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You can choose what the mouse selects in the mesh by clicking one of these buttons below the grid window; the first one is vertices, the second is edges and the third is faces. Click the third one.

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Now you can select a face or group of faces (by holding the Shift key) with the right mouse button.

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Now as you move the faces, the subdivision surface will move, guided by the faces. This means the forms will be smooth and organic and not faceted like the original polygons. It’s like digital plasticine.

To move faces accurately, view the object from the side and not a perspective view. Moving the mesh in edit mode now helps you to deform the subsurface into a shape.

Moving the polygons around by pulling the axis arrows makes them move in a straight line.

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Pull and push the faces around until you have made the desired shape. Play with it a bit to get used to how the mesh moves around, and look at it from all angles to see how it’s shaping up. Drag out spikes (and don’t forget you can push them in, too) all over the mesh for a really crazy organic shape.

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When you’re done playing, you should save your work so you can come back to it. To save the object go to “File -> Save” and choose a location for the .blend file.

General Modelling Advice

This was a very simple tutorial to get you used to the processes in making a shape. We’ll go into more detail about how you can make specific shapes in future articles. But what general tips can we give you while you play and try to make shapes you want to make?

It’s easy for the mesh to get away from you, so by all means plan out what you are making beforehand. Although it’s fun to play and just make freeform shapes, you learn a lot more about the process of building from making a specific object.

Think about what you are making, draw it and measure it, and figure out what the basic forms are and work from there. What has to be actual geometry and what could you do with surface textures?

In forthcoming articles we’ll be looking at advanced modelling techniques, lighting, and applying textures to the geometry to add another layer of reality to your models.

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Blender 3D Materials and Textures Basics

3D objects don’t look like real world objects because they lack colour, depth and texture. But there are ways you can digitally paint your 3D objects in Blender 3D to make them look like the real thing.

In this article we show you how to texturize objects that you make in Blender 3D using photographic bitmaps and graphics you create. If you don’t already have Blender 3D, get your free copy at http://www.blender.org and follow along. It’s available for a variety of platforms.

Painting with Pixels

Modeling objects in Blender 3D is only a third of the picture. First you need objects, then you need textures on the surfaces of those objects, and finally you need lighting. We’ve already covered the first step, and the last step we’ll cover in a later article. Let’s talk about bitmaps.

Bitmaps are old computer speak for graphic image files, the kind you get from Photoshop or Gimp made up of pixels, as opposed to the kind you get from Illustrator or Inkscape which are CAD-type graphics. Files from the latter programs are not a picture; they are a list of instructions for how to draw a picture.

So we need to concern ourselves only with bitmap images, such as JPG, PNG or GIF files. What kind of graphics can you use for object textures? Well if you are an artist you can draw them from scratch. But the majority of usages just use artfully edited photos of real world textures.

A lot of CG you see in movies and TV is not ultra detailed 3D models, but quite simple models with realistic bitmaps covering them. They are like a car covered in photographic vinyls.

Adding Texture

If you haven’t already added an object, for simplicity’s sake, add a sphere. Use “Shift + A” to open the floating menu and “Add -> Mesh -> UV Sphere.” Click the Modifiers button on the Properties menu (the little Spanner). Add modifier, choose Subdivision surfaces and turn the Subdivision Surface up to 3 on View and 6 on Render.

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Change the view to camera by pressing 0 on the keypad.

To add a texture to an object, place the mouse cursor in the bottom left-hand corner of the interface till the cursor turns to a cross. Now drag till you have opened another viewport.

In the left viewport, select Node editor from the View menu. This is where the attributes of the texture will be set by adding nodes.

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If you want to see the changes you make to the texture in real time (and your computer is fast enough), you can set the view to Rendered in the right hand viewport. Click the Viewport Shading menu (the little ball) and choose Rendered. This will show the textures on the objects in the viewport, so you will know when you have it right.

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Note: if you haven’t set it already, choose Cycles Render from the drop-down at the top of the screen. This is a much higher quality rendering engine which we’ll be talking about in a subsequent article when we talk about rendering.

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Right-click on the object you created to select it. On the row of buttons in the Properties editor, select the Material button.

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Click the New button on the default material to assign a basic texture to the object. The default surface type is Diffuse BSDF.

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In the Node editor a couple of nodes will now appear by default: the Diffuse BSDF node and the Object Output node. This is what we will use to form the basis of our texture.

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Use the Add menu down the bottom of the interface to “Add -> Texture -> Image Texture.” The node will be stuck to the cursor until you left-click somewhere in the Node view.

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Click the Open button and add a graphic, a pattern of some kind is best. Change the projection type by clicking on Flat and selecting Sphere from the popup menu.

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Click the output “noodle” on the right of the Image Texture node marked Color, and drag it to connect with the input dot that says Color on the Diffuse BSDF node. Note: input nodes are on the left of each node, and output nodes are on the right. You connect nodes left to right, input -> output.

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Congratulations, you have just mastered Node editing.

Now use “Add -> Vector -> Mapping” to add a mapping node. This will allow you to scale and rotate the bitmap to match the size of your object. Connect the output noodle marked Vector to the input dot marked Vector on the Image Texture node.

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The default on the Mapping node is the Point tab. Change the scale until the texture looks correct in the preview-rendered image in Camera viewport.

Finally “Add -> Input -> Texture Coordinate node” and connect the Generate output noodle to the input dot on the Mapping node marked Vector.

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That’s it: you have a textured sphere. Okay, it won’t win an Academy Award for visual effects, but it’s an object you made, and it’s textured.

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Blender 3D Lighting and Rendering Basics

In previous articles we have told you how to make basic objects and texture them. Now we take on the final third of the journey and tell you how to light them.

In this article we will teach you to light your scene using virtual lights inside Blender 3D and render your scene as a still.

If you don’t have Blender, then go to www.blender.org and download it so you can follow along.

Make a Scene

First, delete the cube and the light in the default scene. Right click on each and press the Delete key on your keyboard. Press Return to accept the delete.

Before you start, choose “Cycles Render” from the drop-down at the top of the screen. This is a much higher quality rendering engine which we’ll be talking about in a subsequent article when we talk about rendering.

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Now add an object, in this case a sphere. Use “Shift + A” to open the floating menu and “Add -> Mesh -> UV Sphere.”

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To smooth the ball, click the Modifiers button on the Properties menu (the little Spanner). Add modifier, choose the Subdivision surfaces and crank the Subdivision Surface up to 3 on View and 6 on Render.

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Right click on the object you created to select it. Now on the Properties editor, select the Material button.

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Click the New button on the default material to assign a basic texture to the object. The default surface type is Diffuse BSDF. Click on Diffuse BSDF and choose instead Glass BSDF.

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Give it a colour, say a blueish hue:

Red = 0.036
Green = 0.036
Blue = 0.800

Now add the first Plane. Press “Shift + A” and “add Mesh -> Plane.” This will be our ground. Select it with the right button, and press Tab to enter edit mode.

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Resize the plane by selecting the edges in turn and stretching them out using the arrows to make your stretching snap to a particular axis. There’s no need to add subdivision surfaces because it’s a flat plane.

Reposition the ground from a side view so it is just touching the bottom of the sphere.

Right-click on the plane to select it. Select the Material button. Click the New button on the default material to assign the surface Diffuse BSDF. Leave the plane as the default light grey.

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Duplicate the ground plane with “Object -> Duplicate Objects” or press “Shift + D.” The duplicate plane will be stuck to your mouse cursor until you click the left button.

Rotate the plane 90 degrees so it is upright by pressing R and using the mouse, keeping an eye on the degrees you are turning it at the bottom left of the screen.

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Position the new plane on the back or side of the ground plane (depending on which way you rotated it). Make another duplicate as before and rotate that 90 degrees so you can make another wall. You have made the corner of a room.

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Note: the reason for all this wall building is that light in Blender needs something to bounce from in order to create a well-lit scene. If you have no walls, then the scene is lit as if it’s in space.

Now add another plane as before. This will be our light. Click on Diffuse BSDF and assign it a surface type of Emission. Crank the strength up to 10. Position it above the sphere and out of the frame so the camera can’t see it.

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Do a Quick Render

We’ll cover rendering in a bit more detail in a future article, but for now, we just need to do a quick render of the scene to check our lighting. Click on the Render properties tab (the little camera).

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Set the image size in the Render panel

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and set the Sampling to Final on the drop-down.

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Click 1 on the keypad, and zoom out with the scroll wheel. Select the camera by right-clicking on it. Change the view to camera by pressing 0 on the keypad.

By default your camera should have been pointing at the spot where the Sphere was created (at coordinates 0,0,0), so it should be in the frame. To line up a proper shot, press R twice and use the mouse (without clicking or holding down any mouse buttons) to frame the shot.

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When you are ready press F12 to render a picture on screen. To save the image, press F3 and select a filename and location for the image.

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Beautiful, yes? When you’re done, save your Blender file for future use.

Once again it’s not a lighting rig worthy of an Academy Award, but it’s the basics. The most basic kind of lighting setup in Blender is the kind of flat plane emission surface we’ve made here, as this gives even lightbox-like light radiation a lovely even light, akin to daylight.

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Blender 3D Advanced Modeling

We use subdivisions and loop cuts to make more complex and realistic shapes.

In our previous article we covered how to create basic objects and use subsurfaces to make more complex analogue shapes. But what if you don’t want organic shapes? What if you want something that looks like a machine with hard edges?

Note: Despite appearances, this is an advanced modelling tutorial that gives you essential techniques for making your models look more professional. It’s not a complex model; it’s a cube, but in order to progress onto more advanced shapes, you need to refine your modelling techniques and attention to detail first. If you can make a cube look realistic, then more complex objects will automatically look more real and professional. Enough said.

Subsurfaces

We talked about subsurfaces last time, but we didn’t really say what they were. The basic shapes you make are a mesh, a 3D object built of a small number of faces. Subsurfaces use those surfaces to build another surface beneath the first, using the original mesh as a control mesh to move and shape the subsurface.

We’ll use them again in this tutorial but in a somewhat different way.

Harden Edges with Loops

The trick with hard surface modelling is to use subdivision surfaces and loop cuts to ramp up the amount of geometry around a corner or edge. Loop cuts add geometry and clustering geometry together at an edge or corner to make the detail more realistic.

Take the basic cube for example. As a default it has sharp clinical edges, but to make it look like a real object and not a computer-generated perfect primitive, you have to have ever-so-slightly rounded edges and corners.

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First, add a subsurface modifier to the cube. Click the Modifiers tab (the spanner) and “Add Modifier -> Subsurface.” Ramp the view subdivisions up to 3 and render up to 6. This turns the cube into a ball, as the subdivisions soften the edges of the geometry.

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To add loop cuts to the cube to bring back the hard edges, select the cube with the right button and enter edit mode. Now you will see the underlying cube and can add geometry to it with loop cuts.

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Click the Loop Cut and Slide button under the tools tab on the left (or use the “Ctrl + R” shortcut), and hover your mouse around the cube. Purple cuts will be displayed as you hover near the edges of the cube. Click the mouse to select one, and now you can slide it back and forth along the plane.

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As you slide it back and forth, you will see the subsurfaces moving to show the new geometry. Click the mouse again to cut the polygons at that point.

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Place another loop cut in the same surface, and slide it to the opposite edge.

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Notice how the geometry is starting to spread out to the edges of the cube.

Add two more loop cuts at the top and bottom. (You will have to hover the mouse around the left and right edges of the face to show them.) Drag them to the edges at a similar distance to the others.

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Now go to another face. You have to do another side to make the loop cuts even on all sides of the cube.

Note: it’s hard to get it until you actually do it, but once you have this technique down, you will be able to do this with any shape.

Now render the image using F12 (making sure to set up some lighting etc., so you can see the cube), and you will see how much more realistic this second cube looks compared to the first at the top of the page.

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Controlling geometry with subsurfaces and loop cuts is a pro technique for making your objects look realistic and professional.

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Blender 3D Animation Basics

Once you’ve made 3D shapes and textured them in Blender, how do you make these objects move around, and how do you render videos?

In this article we cover the basics of animation – keyframes and motion. We also give a quick-start intro to rendering your finished work as a video which will lead into a forthcoming article covering rendering in depth.

Moving it Around

Once you’ve learned to model, texture and light your objects in Blender, you need to render them as some kind of still or animation. We’ll come to the rendering part in a second, but let’s first look at animation.

In a broad sense, animation is a process of making individual images. Then by taking this series of these images and showing them on screen one after the other at twenty-five to thirty frames per second (fps), you get the illusion of movement.

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To make an object move in Blender, you need to set a start point and an end point to the move, and then all the points between the start and end are “in-betweened” or calculated. This means you don’t have to set each position manually by hand like they did (and in some cases still do) in traditional animation.

Key to Animation

Imagine a simple animation. You slide a cube across a plane.

Animation in computers is done with keyframes. You set up the position of the cube object in the first frame (frame 1) and then choose another frame of the animation (say frame 100) and then move the cube to another position.

When you render, the software puts the object in the position you set for the first keyframe, renders an image, and then goes to the next frame. On the next frame, it moves the object towards the next keyframe aiming, as it goes through the frames rendering each in turn, to end up on frame 100 with the object positioned as you specified for the last keyframe.

Note: The things you can keyframe on any frame are positioned in the X, Y or Z axis, and rotation around those axes, or combinations of the three. There are other things you can keyframe in Blender (almost everything in fact), but let’s stick to movement for now.

Meanwhile in Blender

In Blender, setting keyframes is very easy. But as with everything in Blender if you don’t know where it is, you can’t find it.

Open the basic scene in Blender. Change the scene length to about 100 frames.

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Click the “Go to first frame” button to make sure you are at the start on frame 1. Drag the cube somewhere in the frame either freehand or using the axis arrows.

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Press the “I” key and choose “Location” from the popup menu. You have just set a keyframe.

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Now slide the green timeline cursor to a frame about a quarter of the way through, around 25. Move the cube somewhere else. Press “I” and choose “Location.”

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Repeat the process at frame 50 and finally at frame 100.

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You can even go back and insert a keyframe between ones you have already set. Drag the green cursor on the timeline to around frame 75 and then move the cube around to another spot. Remember you can move it up and down as well as side to side; just drag the blue arrow.

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Then press “I” to make another “Location” keyframe as before.

Each time you make a keyframe, you insert a little yellow line on the timeline indicating the presence of a keyframe.

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Now press Play on the transport controls. The cube zips about the screen hitting all the keyframes you set in order and fast enough to get there in time no matter how many laws of physics it has to break to get there.

Render It

On the right of the screen is the control panel. The row of buttons contains all the properties and controls for the program. The little camera button is the display and render properties. Click it.

Scroll down to the “Dimensions’ panel and choose “HDTV 720p” from the drop-down menu. Change the framerate to either 25fps or 30fps. 24 fps is for film (or at least film look).

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Scroll down to the output tab and click the little folder button next to where it says /tmp/ and give the file you will render a location and name.

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Choose a file type; either AVI or MOV are good choices. We chose Quicktime and H264 as the codec.

Finally, let’s add a little motion blur to make the output look a bit more realistic. Scroll down to the sampled motion blur panel and check the box to turn it on, turn the motion samples up to 5 and the shutter duration to 1.0. Now when the object moves fast it will blur as it would in a real camera.

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Don’t worry so much about what all these things mean for now. We’ll cover the rendering side of things in a future article.

Scroll back up to the top and in the Render Panel click the Animation button; your scene will render to disk. Depending on how complicated your scene is, this may take some time.

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The resulting render looks like the cube is riding a crazy invisible roller coaster, but it is real animation in its rawest form. This is how the most expensive and most famous animated films have been made, with keyframes for arms and legs for walking motions, and facial expressions for syncing with the actors’ vocal recordings.

You can legitimately call yourself an animator now, should you choose to do so.

Setting keyframes lets Blender do all the heavy lifting by drawing all the in-between animation frames for you.

All you have to do is set the key frames.

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Mastering 3D rendering in Blender

Once you’ve created your scenes in Blender 3D, how do you render them out as high quality stills and video?

In this article we cover the rendering engines, the settings for rendering, quality levels, file types and all issues connected with taking your Blender scenes and making them into still images and video sequences.

The basics of rendering are as follows. You need to set the size of the frame your camera will capture, and you need to set the quality of the rendered image. If you are capturing stills, you need to know how to save. If you are rendering animation, you need to set the file type of the video file and save them as a sequence.

Video Dimensions

The settings for rendering are located on the right-hand side of the properties panel.

Note: properties panel buttons are “contextual;” that is to say depending on what you have selected in the 3D view, you will see a different row of buttons in the panel. Click an object or a camera, and you will get different buttons for each.

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If you click the little camera button on the Properties toolbar, the top panel marked “Dimensions” sets the image size of your renders. This is not anything to do with the camera or lens. This is the size or dimensions of the final video or still.

There are presets in a drop-down, and usually for video you will set a preset HD video size from here like 1920×1080 or 1280×720. But for still images, these figures can be anything you like.

Frame range means that you can set a start frame and an end frame of your video. For example, if you want a five-second video, and the frame rate is set as 25 frames per second, you will set the start frame to “1” and end frame to “125” to get 125 frames of animation.

And about frame rates: If you come from an NTSC country, you will be used to using 30 frames per second or fps. In PAL countries you will be used to using 25 frames a second. Blender defaults to 24 frames per second.

If your entire video is going to be standalone animation, then you can leave it like that. But if you need your footage to integrate with footage from cameras, you need to know which fps they use. If your camera captures in 30fps, then you need to set Blender to 30fps to make animation that will cut together with the live footage. The same goes for cameras which capture at 25fps.

Rendering Engines

In Blender there are three rendering engines, and I’m going to tell you about two of them. Don’t worry too much about what it means for now, but suffice it to say they are different methods of calculating the image. Don’t worry about the Blender Game engine. For now we are going to concentrate on the other two.

Blender Render is the default render engine, and it’s good for basic rendering. It’s fast and it’s simple, but it uses very basic lights, textures and rendering quality. The light rays don’t bounce around like they do in real life, and the images you get with it, for the most part, are simple computer graphics-looking images.

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This is perfect for logos and motion graphics, etc. If you want fast, or “quick and dirty” as they say in the trade, then Blender Render is your man.

Cycles Render is the highest quality render engine in Blender, and it calculates many light beams. They bounce around like light does in real life. If you want the ultimate quality that Blender can deliver, then always use Cycles Render.

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The quality you get with Cycles is clearly superior with subtle light reflections and realistic light physics. Always use it in preference to Blender Render when you have the computing power and need the quality.

Output and Quality Settings

There are two ways to set the quality of your render. One that goes for either render engine is the Output panel. Here you can set the quality for a still, like a JPG, where you can set the percentage quality. It is here you can also set the location of your saved files and videos by clicking on the little folder icon beside the word “/tmp/.” If no location is set, then the files are rendered to screen.

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The second quality setting only becomes available if you are using the Cycles Render Engine and that is Sampling. This is a tricky concept, and it basically means the amount of light rays that the scene will produce and render.

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The more light rays, the more times they bounce around, the more realistic the scene. But the more light rays, the more time it will take to render. So it’s a tradeoff.

Fortunately, there are presets set for you on a drop-down to set sampling for Preview renders and Final renders. Use Preview to see what it looks like, then set Final for the final render.

And finally, in the output settings you set what kind of media, still or video, you want to render and the file type. Usually still graphics are PNG or JPG, and you get to set the quality as a percentage.

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For video file types, you can choose from many formats, but the only ones you should concern yourself with are either XVID and AVI for PC users or H264 and MOV for Mac users. Select RGB rather than RGBA unless you want to save Alpha channels. (If you need to ask us what those are, then you don’t need to save them. We’ll be covering alpha channels and their uses in a future article.)

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Push the Button

When you are all set and ready to render, you can “push the button.” To render a frame, either hit the F12 key on the keyboard or click the “Render” button in the Render panel. To save the image, press F3 and type a filename, and set the location of the saved file using the browser.

To render an animation, click the Animation button or press “Ctrl + F12” on the keyboard; the target location to save the animation to can be set in the output panel.

Now you know how to render your scenes in Blender.

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Mastering 3D Lighting in Blender

Making images in Blender 3D has a lot in common with photography. In fact, if you have any photographic skills, these will transfer nicely into 3D software like Blender.

We have discussed how you light a scene on a basic level. But how can you use all the different kinds of lamp for something approaching real cinematography?

Types of Lamp

Cinematography is all about choosing the right lights. In the virtual world of a 3D program the lights are all computed rather than real, but they perform the same function as real world lights. To get good lighting in 3D graphics images, you need to have a grasp of lighting in the real world, so a good tip is to learn how to light photographs from photography tutorials out there on the Internet.

The basic types of lamps in Blender are as follows: Point, Sun, Spot, Hemi and Area.

Point

These lights are a tiny ball of light which are omnidirectional – that is to say scattering light in all directions like a lightbulb. Shadows fan out from the source centre in radiating lines.

blender-lighting-mastery-point

Sun

Sun lights emulate the light you get from the sun; the light comes down from the source in parallel lines. Shadows cast straight down from the source and are soft.

blender-lighting-mastery-sunlight

Spot

Spotlights have a point source, but they fan out at a particular angle set in the properties, and they have a soft transition from the middle to the outer radius, the same as a real spotlight. Shadows are hard-edged and follow the angle of the beam.

blender-lighting-mastery-spotlight

Hemi

These lights are like spotlights, but the difference is the source is a half sphere and the light focusses in straight lines, like a lighting brolly. Shadows are hard-edged.

blender-lighting-mastery-hemi

Area

Area lights are flat planes which cast light like a softbox or light reflected from a large reflective surface. Shadows are sharp when the objects are close to a surface but softer when they are distant.

blender-lighting-mastery-area

Emission Surfaces

Another kind of light you can have in Blender is to turn an object into a light by selecting a surface texture of Emission. The texture emits light, meaning you can make a ball, cube or plane be a light emitter. The light is soft and the shadows smooth.

You can turn objects into lights, the benefit being that you can see the lights. The standard lights in Blender are invisible to the camera, but lights which are objects can be seen. The only light sources in this scene are the objects themselves.

blender-lighting-mastery-emission

To set an object to an emission surface, click on the Materials properties, click on the surface drop-down and select “Emission” from the drop-down.

blender-lighting-mastery-emission-surface

Basic Setup

The basic lighting setup taught by all photography courses is to have a key, fill and rim or edge light.

The key light is either a strong, sun-like light or spotlight shining on the front of the object being lit. This casts light on the front and top of the object and shadows on the surface over any undercuts. In this example we used a sun light above and to the right of the camera. Strength is set to 700.

blender-lighting-mastery-skull-no-rim-no-fill

The fill light is positioned opposite to the key light to fill in any shadows. In this example, an Area light is positioned below the camera and to the left pointing up at the object. Strength is set to 75.

blender-lighting-mastery-skull-no-rim

The rim or edge light is positioned behind the object pointing towards the object and the camera to highlight the edge of the object to separate it from its background. In this example, a Hemi light is positioned above, to the left and behind the skull pointing forwards towards the camera. The Strength is set to 2.

blender-lighting-mastery-skull-all

And that is how you light something perfectly.

Lighting Tips

The main tip for setting up lights and even textures in Blender is to use a rendered viewport. This makes a draft-quality rendering of the light that you can see updated in real time to allow you to position lights and shadows perfectly while seeing the effects of your light positions live on the screen.

blender-lighting-mastery-rendered-view

Learn as much as you can about real world lighting for photography and transfer that knowledge to the 3D virtual world of Blender for fantastic lighting.

==========================================================================================================

Master HDR Environment Lighting in Blender 3D

Lighting, especially when you are trying to simulate a real space in 3D, for visual effects purposes can be a minefield. Matching lighting, especially of a natural environment, can involve many lights and much experimentation to get right.

But there is a much simpler way in that you can light a scene with an HDR image by setting it as the background colour. This means you can light an object you are perhaps trying to blend into a scene with lighting from the actual scene.

Sounds complicated, and in some ways it is somewhat more technical than other Blender topics, but we’ll take it slow and explain it as fully as we can.

Environment Maps

HDRI stands for High Dynamic Range Imaging, and it’s received a bit of a bad name lately. HDR has come to mean those brightly coloured “tone-mapped” landscape images people post on the Internet. But that’s not what HDR is.

High Dynamic Range photos are actually photos which have a much higher range of luminance recorded in the file than is shown in the image. Usually they are made by taking three or more images and combining them as a special HDR file to record higher and lower levels of light that cameras can usually record with a single exposure. This means you can closer approximate the way human eyes see a scene.

That’s all very technical, but how does this help you light a scene? You can use a 360º image to actually light a scene using the tones in the picture to shine light on your objects from all angles.

DIY HDR

Making HDR environment maps is quite labour-intensive. You have to make 360º images by putting your camera on a tripod and taking pictures in a circle and stitching them together. That’s quite simple, but you also need to bracket the exposures (taking one overexposed and one underexposed) for each image, and then use software to combine those three images into one. Some DSLR cameras allow you to shoot bracketed exposures with a single click. Then having made your HDR images, you need to stitch them all together as a single 360º image, like the below image.

blender-hdr-bathroom_hdr

Luckily, Blender expert Greg Zaal over at Adaptive Samples has taken a lot of the pain out of this process for you. As well as explaining the long and tedious process of how it can be done for you, he kindly offers a free pack of high-quality Creative Commons HDR environment maps which you can use for lighting your own scenes.

blender-hdr-balcony_hdr

Obviously, the best maps are ones you make yourself, but there are a ton of other pre-made ones out there which may fit the bill for your scenes. Google “HDR environment maps” or “360 HDR” for more examples.

A simpler and quicker way of getting a usable environment map is to take a bracketed set of exposures of a mirrored ball. For example, on the film Batman Begins, all the environmental lighting for CG was captured with chrome balls using a 300mm lens at a distance of around 12′ to shoot a 4″ chrome ball. Another good way to capture HDR is to use a 180º fisheye lens and shoot in one direction, then turn the camera around 180º and shoot the other way.

Once you have shot your chrome ball or fisheye HDR images, you can unwrap them with software like Hugin.

Make a Scene

So having either made or obtained an HDR lighting image, how do you light a scene with a picture? First you need a scene which will show off the subtle lighting, so let’s make a quick one with a couple of spheres and a plane.

When you start Blender, delete the cube and the light source. Select them with the right mouse button and press the “Delete” key. Select “Cycles Render” from the drop-down at the top of the screen, and you are ready to start.

blender-hdr-setcycles

Next add a plane. Press “Shift + A” and choose “Mesh -> Plane.” Now stretch the plane out to fill the grid. Press Tab to enter edit mode. Click the edges button to select edges.

blender-hdr-select-edges

Click on the four edges in turn and stretch them out using the green and red X and Y axis arrows.

blender-hdr-planestretch

Now add a sphere with “Shift + A.” Duplicate it by selecting it and using the Objects menu at the bottom of the screen, “Objects -> Duplicate Objects.”

blender-hdr-duplicate-objects

The duplicate object will be stuck to the cursor. Press the Y key on the keyboard to restrict its movement to the Y axis, then slide it to one side.

Make sure the two balls are sitting on the plane. Go into a side view by pressing the numeric keypad buttons so you can see the two balls side by side. Press the 5 key to make sure you are in orthographic mode. Select the plane and lower it until it sits at the very bottom of the spheres.

blender-hdr-spheres-on-plane

To make the balls nice and smooth, add a subsurface modifier on the Modifiers properties button.

Frame up the shot so the two balls are nicely centred. (We will cover easy framing of shots in a forthcoming article on cinematography.)

blender-hdr-two-spheres

Give the two spheres a colour and surface texture. Select ball one and click the Material properties button.

blender-hdr-materials-properties

Click on Diffuse BSDF, and change it to “Mix Shader” in the pop-up. Then choose the two shaders you will mix, the first being Glossy BSDF and the second being Diffuse BSDF. Adjust the Fac slider to about 0.75. Give the diffuse shader a colour, but leave the glossy one as white.

blender-hdr-surfacetexture

Do the same for the other ball, but give the diffuse shader a different colour.

Lighting with Pictures

Okay, now we can light the scene. Go to the “World properties” button in the Properties panel. The background colour defaults to a dark grey, so to give us a baseline to compare the others, click on that, and crank it all the way up to white.

blender-hdr-world-properties-colour

This is an even white light which covers the scene. Render it with F12 and you will see it’s a good even light, but it’s not subtle or real; it looks like it was photographed in a very bright featureless CG photo studio.

blender-hdr-background-white

Now click on the dot button next to the colour, and select Environment texture from the pop-up.

blender-hdr-add-environment-texture

Now load an HDR as the image in the background to provide the light. (We are using the gorgeous HDRs from Greg Zaal, but any you can find from the Internet will be good as well.)

blender-hdr-world-properties-environment

Before rendering, make sure you check the Multiple Importance checkbox down the bottom in Settings, as this makes Blender treat HDR environment maps as a light and improves the rendering. (Always check this for HDR.)

blender-hdr-multiple-importance

Hike the Map Resolution up to 1024. For another tip to avoid the sparkles which start creeping into complex lit scenes, find the Filter Glossy setting in the Light Paths panel of the render properties, and set it to about 0.5.

blender-hdr-filter-glossy

Now render using F12. Do you see the difference? It actually looks like it was shot outside.

blender-hdr-background-balcony

With every different HDR image the tone of the scene changes. This is an interior with the shades drawn.

blender-hdr-background-blinds

The light comes from different directions, and it is coloured by the image. It’s as if white light is shining through a huge transparent ball around the scene, and on that ball is the image of the original scene.

blender-hdr-background-courtyard

Scenes where the HDR was filmed outdoors look like they are outdoors, and HDRs from interiors look like they are indoors. It’s really quite vivid and obvious.

blender-hdr-background-parking

The subtlety and realism of light you can get with HDR environment maps is amazing, and once you’ve used it you rarely stray back into normal hand-built lighting again. The light is both harsh and bright or soft and diffused and comes from multiple directions, casting shadows and reflections on your object which only enhance the sense of realism.

blender-hdr-background-nightcourtyard

Why Use HDR?

In movie special effects, it is common to add CG elements to real life scenes and use motion tracking to incorporate them into the scenes. But the lighting must match exactly or the CG objects will look fake. So if you take all the photos needed to make an HDR in the location you film as your background plate, you can later on use Blender to render the CG objects in the scene using the environmental illumination from the original scene. That’s very cool.

blender-hdr-background-cabin

====================================================================================================================

Mastering Blender 3D Texture with UV Mapping

Texture mapping is the art of sticking a graphic to the outside of a 3D shape to provide colour and texture. This is how you make your 3D graphics look real in Blender 3D.

There are basic texture mapping controls, but quite soon you realise in Blender that for all but the most basic objects, the way to go is what is known as UV mapping. In this article we explain how to do UV mapping in Blender 3D to make your objects look realistic and fully wrapped in colourful textures.

It’s a wrap

Once you have a 3D shape, you want to add a texture to it. On a basic level this is the diffuse map or the colour of the object. You can just project a bitmap graphic onto the shape, stamping it onto the shape in the X, Y or Z axis, or surrounding it like a cylinder, but that only really works for really basic shapes.

Real world objects don’t have just one colour – they might be aged or rusty or sun bleached. To make more realistic looking objects, you have to take the colours and tones and damage of your object and make them into a texture that you can wrap around the object so the textures look good from all angles. This is especially important if you are using Blender for visual effects and need to duplicate a real world object.

Basic UV mapping

Let’s take a basic bottle shape. It’s not going to be glass but sort of a matte pottery colour. It won’t win any awards, but the techniques will be nice and easy to follow, and you can start applying them to your own models right away.

As usual, set up “Cycles Render” mode by using the drop-down at the top of the screen. We always use “Cycles Render,” as the “Blender Render” is sort of basic. Cycles is much more complex and real looking.

In making a UV map, you don’t have to, but it’s advisable to make “seams” where the image is going to wrap around the object. You have to select edges and declare those as seams, so the shape unwraps predictably.

blender-UV-basic-bottle-subsurface-on

To do this on our demo bottle object, we first have to turn off that lovely subsurface modifier on the surface which it makes it look so curved. Click the little eye button on the subsurface modifier panel on the Material Properties, and the effect will not be displayed in the viewport.

blender-UV-basic-turn-subsurface-off

Once the button has been clicked, the subsurface is no longer visible, and you can start to select edges for seams.

blender-UV-basic-bottle-subsurface-off

Press the TAB key to enter Edit mode. Select edge mode.

blender-UV-basic-select-edges

Now begin to select the edges of the bottle with “Alt + Right Click,” as this will select the whole edge as far as it goes to the top and bottom of the object. Select the corner edges, the edges of the square on top and the bottom. Hold the “Shift” key as you press “Alt + Right Click” to select multiple edges.

blender-UV-basic-select-seams

With all the correct seams selected, press “Control + E,” and choose “Mark Seam” from the popup menu.

blender-UV-basic-mark-seams

The edges will turn orange indicating they are marked as seams.

blender-UV-basic-seams-marked

It’s helpful at this point if you have a dual window open, so go to the bottom left-hand corner of the view window, hover by the little corner grooves, and wait till the cursor becomes a cross. Then drag the new window out so you have two windows on screen at the same time.

blender-UV-basic-UV-editor-window

Then select the left window as a UV Editor window.

blender-UV-basic-select-UV-image-editor

Now go into Face Mode by pressing the face mode button.

blender-UV-basic-select-faces

Select all the faces by pressing A. Now press U and select “Unwrap.” You now have a perfect, well nearly perfect, UV map for your image. This is now tied to the object; any image you map to this object will follow the map.

blender-UV-basic-UV-map

Now before you go any further, click the “Keep UV and Edit mode selection in sync” button at the bottom of the UV Editor window.

blender-UV-basic-sync-UV-editor

Now any selections you make on the object will show in the UV mesh. Use this to establish which face is the front of the bottle.

blender-UV-basic-front-face

Now you need to export the UV map to some kind of image editor. You do this by selecting the “UVs -> Export UV Layout” menu item. A file chooser will pop up, and you can name and save the file.

blender-UV-basic-exported-UV-map

You now have a basis from which to draw your image map for the UV surface in your favourite paint program.

Drawing the Image

Take the image into your favourite image editor, and colour the UV map in the way you would like to see it on the bottle. Pay particular attention to the part of the map that is the front of the bottle.

Position a label there and size it to be the right shape for the front of the bottle.

blender-UV-basic-painted-UV-map

When you are happy with your image, save it as a JPG or PNG and go back to Blender.

Putting it all together

Once back in Blender, select your object and give it a new texture. Choose “Image Texture” from the pop up menu, and load the image map you drew in your image program. The UV map coordinates are saved with the object file, and any image applied to the object takes the map from the UV.

blender-UV-basic-select-image-texture

Add a bit of environmental lighting, turn your subsurfaces back on and render your result.

blender-UV-basic-finished

Okay, it’s not an award-winning shot, but it does what we set out to do: make a UV map that follows the contours of the shape and positions the label of a bottle on the front of the bottle object perfectly.

Of course, you could cheat, as many CG artists working in visual effects do, photograph a bottle from all angles and make an image map to fit from the photos. Many of the effects you see fleeting glimpses of in movies are done exactly this way. CG models of miniature starships are sometimes textured by photographing the model from all sides and just wrapping the images around the shape like a vinyl wrap on a car. We will be covering this use of UV, too, in a future article on visual effects

There is so much you can do with UV mapping, the scope of it all can’t be covered in this basic tutorial.

Guide SOURCE

February 4, 2016

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animation Blender 3D Basics: The Getting Started Guide

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SURbit

Puzzling Interface

Making a Shape

General Modelling Advice

Painting with Pixels

Adding Texture

Make a Scene

Do a Quick Render

Subsurfaces

Harden Edges with Loops

Moving it Around

Key to Animation

Meanwhile in Blender

Render It

Video Dimensions

Rendering Engines

Output and Quality Settings

Push the Button

Types of Lamp

Point

Sun

Spot

Hemi

Area

Emission Surfaces

Basic Setup

Lighting Tips

Environment Maps

DIY HDR

Make a Scene

Lighting with Pictures

Why Use HDR?

It’s a wrap

Basic UV mapping

Drawing the Image

Putting it all together

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