Jason van Gumster

Article / Updated 07-28-2022

One of the most groundbreaking features to hit Blender’s modeling community in recent years was the ability to have dynamic topology (Dyntopo for short) while in Sculpt mode. Simply put, when you enable Dyntopo, your sculpting brush can add or remove geometry from your mesh on the fly. Need more detail in just one part of your model? There’s no need to use the Multiresolution modifier and bump up the vertex count for your whole mesh. Just enable Dyntopo and add that detail exactly where you need it. To use Dyntopo, you need to be in Sculpt mode. While in Sculpt mode, look at the Active Tool tab of the Properties editor. A panel there is named, appropriately, Dyntopo. Left-click the check box at the top of the panel and you’re off to the races, sculpting with dynamic topology. Alternatively, you can also enable Dyntopo with Ctrl+D while in Sculpt mode. The image below shows the Dyntopo panel in Active Tool Properties. For such a powerful Blender feature, there are relatively few options specific to Dyntopo. The following is a quick rundown of the options available in the Dyntopo panel: Detail Size: Dyntopo works by modifying edges within the area of your brush cursor. The Detail Size field defines a value that lets Dyntopo decide whether a specific edge gets modified, based on its length. This value can either be in screen pixels or a percentage, depending on the detail type method that you choose. While sculpting, you can adjust this value with the Shift+D hotkey so you don’t have to constantly return to the Active Tool Properties. Refine Method: Dyntopo can subdivide edges in your mesh and collapse them, removing additional detail. The options in this drop-down menu allow you to control which behavior you want your sculpt brush to use: Subdivide Edges: If an edge within your brush cursor is longer than the detail size, it’s subdivided. This refine method is great for fine details, creases, and sharp peaks. Collapse Edges: When you choose the Collapse Edges option, short edges get collapsed into a single edge. In the case of Dyntopo, a short edge is defined as being two-fifths (2/5) the length of the detail size. This option is great for evening out your topology and removing long skinny triangles that may render weirdly. However, the trade-off is that it also removes any fine details smaller than the detail size. Subdivide Collapse: The Subdivide Collapse option is the default. With this refine method, edges within the area of your brush cursor are subdivided and collapsed, relative to the detail size. This behavior makes the Subdivide Collapse option well-suited for quickly roughing the general forms of your sculpt. Detailing: When sculpting, it’s common for artists to arbitrarily navigate around their model as they work, orbiting, panning, and zooming to get the best view of the section that they’re sculpting. Zooming specifically presents an interesting challenge for Dyntopo because sometimes you want the detail size to remain the same regardless of how much you zoom in or out from your model; other times, you want to do more detailed work as you zoom closer. The options in this drop-down menu let you choose: Relative Detail: This is the default setting. Choose this option to define detail size relative to the pixels on your screen. If you zoom out far enough, all the edges in your mesh become smaller than the detail size. If you zoom in, you only subdivide smaller edges. Constant Detail: Choose the Constant Detail option if you want the detail size to remain the same, regardless of how much you zoom in or out from your model. With this option, detail size is defined as a percentage of the base unit you define in the Scene tab of the Properties editor (the default is 1 meter). Additionally, the Detail Size field at the top of the Dyntopo panel gets an eyedropper button. Left-click that button to sample the geometry in your mesh. This means that you can click the eyedropper on a part of your mesh and the Detail Size field is set to match the edge lengths in that region. Brush Detail: If you pick Brush Detail, then the Detail Size is determined by the percentage of your brush cursor. Increase the radius of your brush cursor and you increase the edge length. Reduce the brush radius and you generate more detailed topology. Manual Detail: Choose this value and edge length is fixed based on the Resolution value you set at the top of the Dyntopo panel. Higher Resolution values mean you sculpt with more detail, regardless of brush size or how close you’re zoomed in on your mesh. Smooth Shading: The Smooth Shading check box toggles between smooth shading and flat shading for your entire mesh while sculpting. This is mostly a personal preference, though some sculptors claim to have a more responsive 3D Viewport with Smooth Shading disabled. Remesh: The Remesh sub-panel within the Dyntopo panel should not be confused with the main Remesh panel in Active Tool Properties. This sub-panel is the one you use while working in Dyntopo to tweak the topology of your sculpt as you work, according to the detail settings you configure in the Dyntopo panel. Symmetrize: With Dyntopo, you can take geometry that you’ve sculpted on one half of your mesh and mirror it to the opposite side. For example, if you did some sculpting without using the features in the Symmetry panel, you may want to mirror that geometry to at least give you a detailed starting point for the other side of your mesh. Left-click the Symmetrize button to do exactly that, based on the direction (such as “from the negative X-axis side of the mesh to the positive X-axis side”) defined in the Direction drop-down menu above the buttons in the Remesh sub-panel. Optimize: As you sculpt with Dyntopo enabled, your brush may become less responsive, with strokes lagging behind your brush cursor as you work. If you run into that, try clicking the Optimize button. When you click, Blender recalculates and rebuilds the underlying data structure that Dyntopo uses to speedily edit the edges on your mesh, often alleviating some sculpting performance slowdowns. Detail Flood Fill: The Detail Flood Fill button is visible only if you have your detail type set to Constant Detail or Manual Detail. Assuming that you have chosen either of those, you can click the Detail Flood Fill button to subdivide (and/or collapse, depending on your chosen detail refine method) every edge in your mesh to match your desired detail size. This is a pretty useful tool for uniformly changing the detail in your mesh (increasing or decreasing it) all at once. Currently, the Symmetrize feature of Dyntopo does not respect any masking that you’ve painted on your mesh. So if you’ve painted a mask in the hope that Symmetrize will only have an effect on the unmasked vertices of your mesh, you’re a bit out of luck. Symmetrize will happily mirror your mesh regardless of the mask, removing or changing those vertices that you wanted to preserve. Of course, the power that a feature like Dyntopo presents also necessarily comes with a few caveats: You can’t have both Dyntopo and a multires mesh at the same time. It’s kind of difficult to have fixed subdivision levels if the underlying topology is constantly changing. Because Dyntopo dramatically changes your mesh topology, it will not preserve additional mesh data like vertex groups, UV coordinates, or vertex colors. Also, if you have some faces on your mesh set to smooth shading and others to flat shading, that also gets changed so all faces are either one or the other, depending on whether you toggle the Smooth Shading check box in the Dyntopo panel. Although you can reduce vertices using Dyntopo, it’s not currently possible to sculpt a hole in your mesh. Unless your model is being used in a still image and never rigged for animation, it almost always will be necessary to retopologize a mesh that’s been sculpted with Dyntopo enabled. Caveats and trade-offs aside, Dyntopo is an extremely powerful tool for modern 3D modeler. Most of the complex models you see on films, television, and the Internet are made with sculpting techniques rather than traditional modeling techniques. In terms of workflow, it goes something like this: Start with a base mesh.Depending on what you’re modeling, the base mesh could be as simple as a sphere like you get in the default Sculpting workspace, or a somewhat more complex rough form for the model, such as a 3D stick figure to start a character model. In the ideal case, whatever your base mesh is, it should have evenly distributed faces (that is, all the faces on your base mesh should be roughly the same size). Sculpt with Dyntopo.With Dyntopo enabled, use the various sculpting tools to produce your impressive 3D sculpt. From Object mode, create a new mesh.It doesn’t much matter what kind of mesh it is. When you get into Edit mode, you’ll need to initially delete all the geometry in it so you can start the next step. Retopologize the sculpt using the newly created mesh.At this point, you’re basically using the sculpt as a 3D reference model to which you can snap your clean topology vertices. Finalize and polish the retopologized mesh.This is where details are re-added using traditional modeling techniques. In this step, you may also bake some of that additional detail from the high resolution sculpt into a texture that you apply to your retopologized mesh.

Cheat Sheet / Updated 03-12-2021

When it comes to Blender, you can save time in many ways. Memorizing common mouse actions and numeric keypad hotkeys in Blender or common keyboard hotkeys in Blender’s 3D View help you work more efficiently in Blender. If memorization isn’t your thing, you can even print lists of these mouse actions and hotkeys and refer to them whenever you need to.

Article / Updated 06-15-2020

What is the Blender software and what can you do with it? Blender is a free and open source 3D modeling and animation suite. Yikes! What a mouthful, huh? Put simply, Blender is a computer graphics program that allows you to produce high-quality still images and animations using three-dimensional geometry. It used to be that you’d only see the results of this work in animated feature films or high-budget television shows. These days, it’s way more pervasive. Computer-generated 3D graphics are everywhere. Almost every major film and television show involves some kind of 3D computer graphics and animation. (Even sporting events! Pay close attention to the animations that show the scores or players’ names.) And it’s not just film and TV; 3D graphics play a major role in video games, industrial design, scientific visualization, and architecture (to name just a few industries). In the right hands, Blender is capable of producing this kind of work. With a little patience and dedication, your hands can be the right hands. One of the things that makes Blender different and special compared to other similar 3D software is that it is freely available without cost, and that it’s free and open source software. Being free of cost, as well as free (as in freedom) and open source, means that not only can you go to the Blender website and download the entire program right now without paying anything, but you can also freely download the source, or the code, that makes up the program. For most programs, the source code is a heavily guarded and highly protected secret that only certain people (mostly programmers hired by the company that distributes the program) can see and modify. But Blender is open source, so anybody can see the program’s source code and make changes to it. The benefit is that instead of having the program’s guts behind lock and key, Blender can be improved by programmers (and even non-programmers) all over the world! Because of these strengths, Blender is an ideal program for small animation companies, freelance 3D artists, independent filmmakers, students beginning to learn about 3D computer graphics, and dedicated computer graphics hobbyists. It’s also being used (if a bit clandestinely) more and more in larger animation, visual effects, and video game studios because it’s relatively easy to modify, has a very responsive development team, and no need for the headache of licensing servers. Blender, like many other 3D computer graphics applications, has had a reputation for being difficult for new users to understand. At the same time, however, Blender is also known for allowing experienced users to bring their ideas to life quickly. Fortunately, with the help of the regular improvements introduced in each new release of Blender, that gap is becoming much easier to bridge. Blender’s origins and the strength of the Blender community The Blender you know and love today wasn’t always free and open source. Blender is actually quite unique in that it’s one of the few (and first!) software applications that was “liberated” from proprietary control with the help of its user community. Originally, Blender was written as an internal production tool for an award-winning Dutch animation company called NeoGeo, founded by Blender’s original (and still lead) developer, Ton Roosendaal. In the late 1990s, NeoGeo started making copies of Blender available for download from its website. Slowly but surely, interest grew in this less-than-2MB program. In 1998, Ton spun off a new company, Not a Number (NaN), to market and sell Blender as a software product. NaN still distributed a free version of Blender, but also offered an advanced version with more features for a small fee. There was strength in this strategy and by the end of 2000, Blender users numbered well over 250,000 worldwide. Unfortunately, even though Blender was gaining in popularity, NaN was not making enough money to satisfy its investors, especially in the so-called “dot bomb” era that happened around that time. In 2002, NaN shut its doors and stopped working on Blender. Ironically, this point is where the story starts to get exciting. Even though NaN went under, Blender had developed quite a strong community by this time, and this community was eager to find a way to keep their beloved little program from becoming lost and abandoned. In July of 2002, Ton provided a way. Having established a non-profit organization called the Blender Foundation, he arranged a deal with the original NaN investors to run the “Free Blender” campaign. The terms of the deal were that, for a price of €100,000 (at the time, about $100,000), the investors would agree to release Blender’s source code to the Blender Foundation for the purpose of making Blender open source. Initial estimations were that it would take as long as six months to one year to raise the necessary funds. Amazingly, the community was able to raise that money in a mere seven weeks. Because of the Blender community’s passion and willingness to put its money where its metaphorical mouth was, Blender was released under the GNU General Public License on October 13, 2002. With the source in the community’s hands, Blender had an avalanche of development and new features added to it in a very short time, including somewhat common features like Undo (a functionality that was conspicuously missing and highly desired since the initial releases of Blender by NeoGeo). Nearly two decades later, the Blender community is larger and stronger than ever. Blender itself is a powerful modern piece of software, competitive in terms of quality with similar software costing thousands of dollars. Not too shabby. The image below shows screenshots of Blender from its early days to the Blender of today. Making open movies and games with Blender One of the cool things about the programmers who write Blender is that many of them also use the program regularly. They’re writing code not just because they’re told to do it, but because they want to improve Blender for their own purposes. Many of Blender’s developers started as artists who wanted to make Blender do something it hadn’t been able to do before. Part of the programmers’ motivation has to do with Blender’s open source nature, but quite a bit also has to do with the fact Blender was originally an in-house production tool, built for artists, based on their direct input, and often written by the artists themselves. Seeking to get even more of this direct artist feedback to developers, the Blender Foundation launched “Project Orange” in 2005. The project’s purpose was to create an animated short movie using open source tools, primarily Blender A team of six members of the community were assembled in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, to produce the movie. Roughly seven months later, Elephants Dream premiered and was released to the public as the first open movie. This means that not only was it created using open source tools, but all the production files — 3D models, scenes, character rigs, and so on — were also released under a permissive and open Creative Commons Attribution license. These files are valuable tools for discovering how an animated film is put together, and anyone can reuse them in their own personal or commercial work. Furthermore, if you don’t like Elephants Dream, you’re free to change it to your liking! How many movies give you that luxury? You can see the film and all the production files for yourself at the project’s website. Due to the success of the Orange project, Ton established the Blender Institute in 2007 for the expressed purpose of having a permanent space to create open movie and game projects, as well as provide the service of training people in Blender. Since then, the Blender Institute has churned out open projects (most codenamed with a type of fruit) every couple of years. Like with Elephants Dream, both the final product and the production files for each project are released under a permissive Creative Commons license. More recently, the Blender Institute has spun off a separate entity, the Blender Animation Studio, a Blender-based animation studio with the goal of producing and releasing a feature-length animated film. The table below summarizes each of the Blender Institute’s open projects. Open Projects from the Blender Institute Year Fruit Title Details 2005 Orange Elephants Dream Animated Short Film (improved animation, basic hair, node-based compositing) 2008 Peach Big Buck Bunny Animated Short Film (enhanced particles, large scene optimization, improved rendering, more animation and rigging tools) 2008 Apricot Yo Frankie! Video Game (asset creation pipeline, real-time viewport, updates to the Blender Game Engine) 2010 Durian Sintel Animated Short Film (battle-test Blender 2.5, detailed sculpting, large environments) 2012 Mango Tears of Steel Live Action Short Film (visual effects tools, motion tracking, Cycles rendering) 2013 N/A Caminandes 2: Gran Dillama Animated Short Film (cartoony animation with a minor focus on furry characters) 2015 Gooseberry Cosmos Laundromat Animated Short Film (large-scale internationally collaborative productions with Blender Cloud) 2015 N/A Glass Half Animated Short Film (cartoony animation with non-photorealistic real-time rendering) 2016 N/A Caminandes 3: Llamigos Animated Short Film (cartoony characters with a secondary focus on VR rendering) 2018 N/A Hero Animated Short Film (2D and 2.5D animation using Grease Pencil) 2018 N/A The Daily Dweebs Animated Short Film (fast turnaround cartoony animation) 2019 N/A Spring Animated Short Film (battle-test Blender 2.80, Eevee viewport) This image shows rendered images from a bunch of the open projects. With the completion of each of these projects, the functionality and stability of Blender significantly increased. All these projects continue to exhibit the strength of the Blender community. Each of them were financed in a large part by DVD presales (and now Blender Cloud subscriptions) from users who understand that regardless of the project’s final product, great improvements to Blender are the result, and everyone benefits from that. Check out these Blender resources to learn more.

Article / Updated 03-18-2020

Blender has sooooooo many great tools for getting your animation just right. Part of getting the movement right involves giving your characters the natural movements. Guess what? Blender also has a tool for that! Not everything that reacts to physics has the internal jiggle and bounce that soft bodies have. Say, for example, that you have to animate a stack of heavy steel girders falling down at a construction site For that animation, you don’t want to have a soft body simulation. You could technically get the correct behavior with really stiff settings in Blender’s Soft Body Edges panel, but that’s a bit of a kludge and potentially very CPU-intensive. You’d be better off with rigid body dynamics. As their name implies, rigid bodies don’t get warped by collisions the way that soft bodies do. They either hold their form when they collide, or they break. Like the other physical simulation types, the controls for rigid bodies are in Blender’s Physics Properties. You need only left-click the Rigid Body button. Follow these steps to get a simple rigid body simulation with Blender’s default cube: Select the cube and move it up in the Z-axis by a few units. You can move the cube using the Move tool or more quickly by using the G hotkey. Like the soft body simulation, 3 to 5 meters should be fine. Create a mesh plane to act as the ground (Add→Mesh→Plane) and scale it larger so that you have something for the cube to hit (S or use the Scale tool). With your plane still selected, add a Rigid Body panel in Physics Properties. Unlike the soft bodies example, your ground plane should not get a collision panel. This is unique to how rigid bodies work in Blender. In your newly created Rigid Body panel, change the Type drop-down menu from Active to Passive. This tells Blender that the ground plane should be part of the rigid body calculations, but that it isn’t going to be a moving object. Setting the type to Passive is basically how you set up a rigid body collider. Back in the 3D Viewport, select your cube. Make a Rigid Body panel in Physics Properties. That’s the last required step to have your cube drop into the scene. You may want to give the cube a bit of an arbitrary rotation (use the Rotate tool or the R→R hotkey sequence) so it lands and bounces around on the plane in a more interesting way. Play back the animation (Spacebar) to watch the cube fall, hit the ground plane, and bounce around a bit. Congratulations! You have a rigid body simulation. The image below shows a breakdown of the preceding steps.

Article / Updated 03-18-2020

Blender offers a variety of sculpting tools to help you master stunning creations. Once you’ve created your Grease Pencil object, it’s time to do some sculpting. After you have your drawing created in a Grease Pencil object, may want to go in and do some custom tweaks to it. Perhaps you want thicker or thinner lines in some places. Or maybe you drew the whole thing with your mouse and the linework is all shaky and uneven so you need to smooth it out. Or it could be that your proportions are slightly off and you need to push the parts of your drawing around to fix it. Perhaps you did your original Grease Pencil without the benefit of a pressure-sensitive tablet and you want to add variation to line thickness and opacity after the fact. For those kinds of situations, Blender’s Sculpt mode for Grease Pencil objects is perfect. You can quickly switch between modes by pressing Ctrl+Tab and using the mode switching pie menu. When you enter Sculpt mode on a Grease Pencil object, you have the following Blender tools at your disposal: Smooth: Choose this tool and you can use it to take the jitter out of any strokes you made while drawing. One thing to note about the Smooth tool is that it affects the control points of your stroke, not really the stroke itself. That means if you created a stroke using the Ink Pen Rough brush in Draw mode, the Smooth tool isn’t going to reduce the noisiness of the stroke, just the smoothness of the segments from one control point to the next. Like the Smooth tool when mesh sculpting, you can quickly access this tool from any other tool by holding down Shift as you left-click and drag in the 3D Viewport. Thickness: If you find that you’re not satisfied with the line width of the strokes in your drawing, you can use the Thickness tool to adjust it. Left-click and drag over a stroke and it gets wider. If you hold Ctrl while sculpting with the Thickness tool, it reduces the width of the strokes your brush cursor touches. Strength: Think of this as a kind of opacity tool for sculpting. Using this tool you can make semitransparent strokes more opaque and, if you hold down Ctrl, you can soften strokes that are already dark. Randomize: The Randomize tool is kind of like the evil doppelganger of the Smooth tool. Rather than reduce variation along the length of a stroke, the Randomize brush increases variability, ultimately making your linework more shaky and uneven. Used with animation, this sculpt tool could be used to add a bit of “line boil” to your lines so they undulate over time. Grab: Much like the corresponding tool in mesh sculpting, the Grease Pencil sculpting Grab tool moves the control points of your strokes around, much like if you’d selected them in Edit mode and moved them with Proportional Editing enabled. Push: The Push tool is kind of like a cousin of the Grab tool. Functionally, they’re similar in that they move around the control points that are within the area of your brush cursor. However, the Push tool relies more on the direction you move that brush cursor. If you’ve worked with a “liquefy” effect in 2D graphics application, the Push tool feels very much like that. Twist: You might think that the Twist tool is like the Rotate tool when mesh sculpting or even the regular Rotate tool. If you did, you’d only be partially correct. Although this tool does rotate control points that are under your brush cursor, it’s more of a cumulative effect; you don’t have to move your brush cursor at all. Just hold down the left mouse button and anything within the area of the brush cursor spins around its center. By default, the Twist tool spins things counterclockwise. Hold down Ctrl to twist in the clockwise direction. Pinch: When you sculpt with the Pinch tool, any control points within the area of your brush cursor are pulled to its center. By sculpting with this tool, you can pull control points closer to each other. Hold down Ctrl to repel control points from the center of your brush cursor, effectively spreading them apart. Clone: The Clone tool allows you to paste copies of a stroke in other parts of the scene. This tool is not at all like the Clone tool when in Texture Paint mode. The only similarity is that you need to select a reference to actually clone. In the case of the Clone tool in Grease Pencil’s Sculpt mode, you make that reference by selecting all or part of a stroke in Edit mode and copying it (Grease Pencil→Copy or Ctrl+C). With a stroke copied, Ctrl+Tab back over to Sculpt mode and you can use the Clone tool to paste as may copies of that stroke as you’d like. Want to keep improving? Try these tips to be a more effective Blender artist.

Article / Updated 03-17-2020

If you’re already used to object animation and the basics of Blender, using armatures to animate in the Dope Sheet extends naturally from that process. The following is a common process for animating with Blender. Plan the animation. This point can’t be emphasized enough: Know what you’re going to animate and have an idea about the timing of the motion. Act out the action. If you can, record yourself acting it out. Video reference is key for seeing subtle movements. Sketch out a few quick thumbnail drawings of the sequence. Even stick-figure drawings can be really helpful for determining poses and figuring out camera framing. Set your timeline cursor at frame 1 and create the starting pose for your character by manipulating its rig in Pose mode. Select all visible bones (Select→All) and Insert a LocRotScale keyframe for everything (Pose→Animation→Insert Keyframe→LocRotScale). Granted, there’s a good chance that most of the bones can’t be moved or scaled, but only rotated, so setting a location or scale keyframe for them is kind of moot. However, setting a keyframe for all the bones is faster than going through and figuring out which bones can be keyed for just rotation and which bones can be keyed for some combination of rotation, location, and scale.Alternatively, if you’ve set up a keying set for your character, you can pick that keying set from within the Keying rollout in the Timeline. Then you can insert keyframes for every property in that keying set just by pressing I. Within the Dope Sheet, make sure all your recently added channels are selected (they should be by default) and change the interpolation type to Constant (Key→Interpolation Mode→Constant). This is kind of an optional step, but it’s really helpful for the blocking pass of your animation. With Constant interpolation set, you can focus exclusively on your character’s poses and the timing between those poses without the distraction of seeing how Blender generates the in-betweens for you. Move the timeline cursor forward to roughly when you think the next major pose should happen. It doesn’t really matter which editor you use to adjust the timeline cursor. It could be the Timeline, the Dope Sheet, or the Graph Editor. In fact, using ←and →, you can even adjust the timeline cursor from the 3D Viewport. Create your character’s second pose. If the next pose is a hold, or a pose where the character doesn’t change position, you can duplicate the keys of the previous pose by selecting them in the Dope Sheet and choosing Key→Duplicate or by pressing Shift+D. The Shift+D hotkey combination also works in the Timeline. Select all visible bones (A) and Insert an Available keyframe (Pose→Animation→Insert Keyframe→Available). Again, if you’re using a keying set, you can just press I. If you wanted, you could also switch to the Available keying set in the Timeline before inserting keyframes. Continue with Steps 5 through 7 until you complete the last major pose for your character. Using the Dope Sheet, play back the animation (Spacebar), paying close attention to timing. At this point, hopefully your poses are acceptably refined, so you should pay even more attention to timing than to the accuracy of the poses. Go through the keys in the Dope Sheet and tweak the timing of the poses so that they look natural. Continuing to tweak, go back and start adding additional poses and keyframes for secondary motion between your major poses. Somewhere around here you’ve migrated from the blocking phase of animation to the refining phase. So at this point, you may want to select all the keys in your animation and switch back to Bézier interpolation (Key→Interpolation Mode→Bézier). Now you can focus on perfecting the Continue on this course, refining the timing and detail more and more with each pass. One luxury of computer animation is the ability to continually go back and tweak things, make changes, and improve the animation. You can take advantage of this process in Blender by training yourself to work in passes. Animate your character’s biggest, most pronounced motion first. Make sure that you have the timing down. Then move to the next pass, working on slightly more detailed parts of the performance. For example, animate your character’s arm and hand bones before you get into the nitty-gritty details of animating the fingers. The biggest reason to work this way is time. It’s much easier to go in and fix the timing on a big action if you do it earlier. Otherwise, you run into situations where you find yourself shuffling around a bunch of detail keys after you find out that your character doesn’t get from Point A to Point B in the right amount of time. Don’t be afraid to break out a stopwatch and act out the action to find out exactly how long it takes to perform and what the action feels like. Animation is very much like acting, by proxy. So it helps to know what some actions actually feel like when they’re performed. If you’re fortunate enough to have friends, have them act out the action for you while you time it or even record it to video. Getting animation to look right is all about having the proper timing. Principles of animation worth remembering As you create your animations in Blender, try to pull from a variety of sources to really capture the essence of some action, motion, or character expression. The first and most emphatic recommendation is to keep your eyes open. Watch everything around you that moves. Study objects and try to get an idea of how their structure facilitates motion. Then think about how you would re-create that movement. Of course, merely gawking at everything in the world isn’t the only thing you should do (and you should be prepared for the fact that people will probably look at you funny when you do gawk). Studying early animation is also a good idea. Most of the principles that those wonderfully talented pioneers developed for animation are still relevant and applicable to computer animation. In fact, you should remember the classic 12 basic principles of animation that were established by some of the original Disney animators. These principles are a bit of divergence, but if your aim is to create good animation, you should know about them and try to use them in even the most simple of animations: Squash and stretch: This one is all about deformation. Because of weight, anything that moves gets deformed somehow. A tennis ball squashes to an oval shape when it’s hit. Rope under tension gets stretched. Cartoon characters hit all believable and unbelievable ranges of this when they’re animated, but it’s valuable, albeit toned down, even in realistic animation. Anticipation: The basic idea here is that before every action in one direction, a buildup in the opposite direction occurs first. A character that’s going to jump bends her knees and moves down first to build up the energy to jump upward. Staging: The idea of staging is to keep the frame simple. The purpose of animation is to communicate an idea or a movement or an emotion with moving images. You want to convey this idea as clearly as possible with the way you arrange your shots and the characters in those shots. A good trick here is to use Solid viewport shading. Using the Shading rollout in the 3D Viewport’s header, you can change the Lighting setting to Flat and the Color setting to Single (and set the color swatch that appears to black). If you can still tell what’s going on with just a silhouette, then you’ve got good staging. Straight-ahead action versus pose-to-pose action: These are the two primary methods of animating. Pose-to-pose techniques can be more organized and structured, but it may result in movement that’s cartoony or robotic. Straight-ahead action is generally a more open-ended approach and gives more freedom for improvisation, but the action may be less clear and more difficult to tweak on future passes. Most modern animators use a hybrid approach, blocking in the initial poses and then working straight-ahead between them. Follow through and overlapping action: The idea here is to make sure that your animations adhere (or seem to adhere) to the laws of physics. If you have movement in one direction, the inertia of that motion requires you to animate the follow-through even if you’re changing direction. When a character throws a ball, his arm doesn’t stop moving when the ball is released. The arm follows through with its own momentum. Ease in and ease out: Ease in and ease out, sometimes known as “slow in, slow out,” means that natural movement does not stop and start abruptly. It flows smoothly, accelerating and decelerating. By using Bézier curves in the Graph Editor, you actually get this principle for free, though that doesn’t mean you should just take the defaults. Depending on the type of movement, you often have to customize the degree of easing in your animation (for example, a bounce eases in and out very fast in a way that doesn’t necessarily look smooth). Arcs: Along the same lines as the previous two principles, most natural movement happens in arcs. So if your character is changing direction or moving something, you typically want that to happen in some sort of curved, arc motion. Straight lines are generally stiff and robotic (and therefore good for machinery and robots), but they’re also very useful for powerful actions like punching. Secondary action: These actions are those additional touches that make characters appear more real to the audience. Clothing that shifts with character movement, jiggling fat or loose skin, and blinking eyes are just a few actions that can breathe life into an otherwise stiff, empty puppet. Timing: Timing is one of the most important of the 12 principles. Everything happens according to time. If the timing is off, it throws off the effect for the whole animation. This doesn’t just refer to the timing of actions to appear believable. This is also in reference to story-based timing — knowing exactly the right time to make a character give a sad facial expression that impacts the audience the most. Think of it like telling a joke. The best punchline in the world will fall flat if you don’t say it at exactly the right time. Exaggeration: Exaggeration makes animation fun. You can do anything with animation, and you’re nearly duty-bound to take advantage of that fact. Otherwise, you may as well just work in video or film with meatspace people. Solid drawing: Solid drawing refers to the actual skill of being able to draw. Computer animators can get away with not being experts at drawing, but it’s to your benefit to make the effort. Drawing is an extension of seeing. When you draw, you turn on a part of your brain that studies how things look relative to one another. Being able to see the world with these eyes can make all the difference in re-creating believable motion. Besides, with Grease Pencil objects, you can draw in Blender, too! Appeal: This one is easy. Make things that are awesome. If you’re going to animate something boring, what’s the point? It needs to be interesting for you to make, and it’s nice if it’s also interesting for other people to watch. Those are the basic principles of animation, but not a single one of them is carved in stone and you should certainly play around in Blender to see what works best. You can effectively break every one of them and still pull off some incredible animation. That said, more often than not, it’s in the best interest of your work and your sanity that you at least start within these principles and then later on find ways where you can break them in the best way possible. Check out these Blender websites for additional information.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

Blender is designed to be used with one hand on the keyboard and the other on the mouse. Nearly every key on a standard keyboard is assigned to some task within Blender, and sometimes more than one task. For example, the numbers across the top of the keyboard reveal each of the first ten Blender layers. Alt+Any number shows each of the last ten layers. Shift+Any number allows you to show more multiple layers simultaneously. And that’s not all! The following table shows some of the more commonly used hotkeys while working in Blender. HotkeyDescription A Toggle select all/none Alt+A Play animation in view Shift+A Show Add menu C Circle (Brush) select Shift+D Duplicate Alt+D Linked duplicate E (edit mode) Extrude F (edit mode) Create face/edge G Grab/move Alt+G Clear location H Hide selected Alt+H Reveal all I Insert keyframe Ctrl+J Join selected objects L (edit mode) Select linked vertices Shift+L (edit mode) Deselect linked vertices M Move selection to layer Ctrl+M Mirror selection N Show Properties region Ctrl+N New Blender session Ctrl+N (edit mode) Calculate normals outside O (edit mode) Enable proportional editing P (edit mode) Separate to new object Ctrl+P Make parent Alt+P Clear parent R Rotate Alt+R Clear rotation S Scale Alt+S Clear scale U (edit mode) Unwrap mesh V Toggle Vertex Paint mode W (edit mode) Specials menu Ctrl+S Save file X Delete selection Ctrl+Z Undo Ctrl+Shift+Z Redo Spacebar Show search menu Shift+Spacebar Maximize editor area Ctrl+Spacebar Toggle manipulator Alt+Spacebar Change manipulator orientation Tab Toggle Edit mode Shift+Tab Toggle snapping

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

The numeric keypad gives you a high-speed means of navigating the 3D View in Blender. The following table explains some of the more useful and common hotkeys that involve the numeric keypad. (Note: If you’re using a laptop that doesn’t have a numeric keypad, you can enable the Emulate Numpad check box in the Input section of User Preferences and use the numbers along the top of your keyboard instead of the numeric keypad.) Hotkey Description 1 Front view Ctrl+1 Back view 2 Rotate view up Ctrl+2 Pan view up 3 Left side view Ctrl+3 Right side view 4 Rotate view left Ctrl+4 Pan view left 5 Toggle perspective/orthographic view 6 Rotate view right Ctrl+6 Pan view right 7 Top view Ctrl+7 Bottom view 8 Rotate view down Ctrl+8 Pan view down 9 Redraw screen 0 Camera view Ctrl+Alt+0 Set camera to viewport / Toggle local view . (dot/period) Zoom on selection + Zoom into view

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

You can paint your texture in an image-editing program like Krita or Photoshop, but you may be able to use Blender instead. You can add a lot of detail within Blender using a combination of the UV/Image Editor and Texture Paint mode in the 3D View. Start from the UV Editing screen layout. Image painting in the UV/Image Editor Probably the quickest and easiest way to start painting is to hop right into the UV/Image Editor and enable Painting mode from the Editing Context drop-down menu in the UV/Image Editor's header. The Tool Shelf (T) of the UV/Image Editor updates with a set of paint tools you can use. Using Texture Paint mode On some models, the disconnect between painting on the image and seeing the result on the mesh is disorienting. Predicting how the texture will ultimately lay on the mesh is sometimes too difficult. In these cases, painting directly in the 3D View is often easier: For painting in the 3D View with Blender Internal, use the Multitexture Shading style, which you can set from the 3D View's Properties region in the Display panel. Although you don't see the lighting results that you get when using GLSL, the texture colors are more vibrant and close to what you're actually painting. If you're rendering with Cycles, all you have is the Multitexture appearance. If the model has been vertex painted, those faces should still be hidden. If not, you can hide them in exactly the same way you would when vertex painting. You can leave Painting mode active in the UV/Image Editor and Texture Paint active in the 3D View at the same time. Then you can switch between painting on the image and painting on the mesh, depending on your specific needs.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

There are many sites on the web that are excellent places to check out for Blender news, extensions, and services. This is a listing of some of those helpful sites. Blender.today Blender.today is a community-run website for Blender news. It works similar to sites like Reddit, where anyone can post a link or an article and the community up-votes or down-votes that post based on how interesting or relevant it is. The site is still new, but it's already proven itself to be a great place to go for the latest news as it pertains to Blender. Pasteall.org When getting help with your projects online, be it on sites like BlenderArtists.org or on IRC (Internet Relay Chat), it's often helpful to share files with others. Pasteall.org is a free site made by Blender users with that explicit purpose. You can upload images, code snippets, and even .blend files to share with others. Just upload your file and the site gives you a Web link that you can share with anyone else. P3d.in Sharing .blend files is great when you're sharing with other Blender users, but what if you want to share your 3D model with someone who doesn't use Blender? Sure, you could tell them to download and install Blender themselves (it's free, after all), but that might be more effort than they're willing to go through just to see what you've made. Fortunately, p3d.in helps fill that gap. You can upload a static 3D scene and p3d.in displays that scene in 3D right in your web browser! No need for special downloads or anything. You share your scene and anyone can see it in its full 3D glory. Sketchfab Sketchfab offers features similar to p3d.in, but also has a few more additional features, including private viewing and integration with a few more programs and websites. It also shades models slightly differently, so you should both p3d.in and Sketchfab to see which suits your needs the best. Sheep It Render Farm Rendering your images and animations can commandeer your computer's processing power for long stretches of time. On a long, complex animation with a lot of detail, it can take days and weeks to render. This is why it's useful to have a render farm. A render farm combines the processing power of many computers to complete a render job, substantially reducing your overall render times. Unfortunately, setting up a personal render farm can be very expensive. However, you don't have to spend that money. Sheep It is a community-based render farm. You can sign up and voluntarily offer extra processing power from their computers to help with rendering images. It basically allows you to use the entire Internet (well, at least the part that's signed on to Sheep It) as a giant render farm. It's an incredibly cool use of the Internet and a fantastic service. Blendersupport.com The Blender community is typically very, very good at providing feedback and support as you work your way through understanding how to use Blender. Sometimes, however, it's useful to have direct, hands-on assistance and training. The good folks over at BlenderSupport.com have exactly what you need. There is a cost for this service, but when you need just the exact right answer for your problem, it's certainly worth it. Blender Network As you continue working with Blender, you may start using it professionally (you know, to make money). Or perhaps you've gotten yourself good enough to be dangerous with Blender, but you need an expert to help on a specific part of your project. In either case, the Blender Network is the place to go. As its name implies, the Blender Network a networking site for people who use Blender professionally. You can register yourself on the site to be listed among them, post and search for Blender-related jobs or, if you're looking for a Blender professional, you can search it for the exact person you need. Blender Market The Blender Market is a website set up by the good people at CG Cookie to allow Blender users to buy and sell assets for using in Blender. These assets could be models, materials, character rigs, and even extensive add-ons for Blender that dramatically increase Blender's capabilities. Through Blender Market you can purchase these assets or, if you've made something that you feel other people would find valuable, you can sell your own creations to the community. Blender Cloud As part of launching the Gooseberry open movie project, the Blender Foundation also launched the Blender Cloud. The Blender Cloud is the official “home base” for content from the Blender Foundation and the Blender Institute. All of the assets from each of the open movie projects can be found there, as well as any of the training material that's been sold in the Blender e-shop. And the site is still young. In the future, you may be able to host your own collaborative projects there, and even use community-based render farming. There is a subscription cost for being part of the Blender Cloud, but for what's available (and what's to come), it's definitely worth it. BlenderBasics.com BlenderBasics.com is the author's website for Blender For Dummies. On this site are files and tutorials, all completely free for you. And if there are any additional files, tutorials or errata, BlenderBasics.com is the first place you should look.