blender - open source 3D creation software
- Details
- Last Updated: Friday, 10 July 2020 17:55
- Published: Sunday, 19 April 2020 00:52
- Hits: 2628
Blender: Blender is an open source 3D computer graphics toolset. You can use it to make animated movies (like animated netflix movies), edit your2D videos (like windows moviemaker), edit pictures, make video games, and much more. Blender is very powerful and used to make commercial movies. This is one software you can learn, and do eveything related to pictiures and videos.
official blender website:
Install Blender on Linux: installing Blender on Linux is very simple. Download Blender 2.82 binary for linux (it's a tar.xz file) from blender.org, extract it in folder of your choice, Within the extracted folder, click on the blender executable file (blender-2.82a-linux64/blender). That should open up the Blender GUI. I've tried it on Linux Mint, and binary executable works w/o any issues. You may also use the package manager if blender package is available for that particular linux distro (in case binary executable doesn't work). Make sure you download latest blender version 2.82, as the 2.82 version i/f is very different and much more refined than earlier versions. Also, lot of tutorials on internet are with 2.82 version, so it helps to have this version. You can also add "blender" to menu item on menu or add to panel, so that it's easier to access.
Blender Basics:
When you open blender by clicking on blender executable, you see a gui with too many buttons. It's intimidating, and it takes a while to figure out the buttons. There are various videos on youtube, but blender have so many capabilities that each of these series focuses on some particular aspect of blender. However, knowing blender basics and it's i/f is going to be helpful across all it's toolset. Here are some videos to get started:
official blender channel on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSMOQeBJ2RAnuFungnQOxLg
Below is series of videos great for getting started (total 43 videos, about 8-10 hours): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa1F2ddGya_-UvuAqHAksYnB0qL9yWDO6
Another great series is from "blender guru" who shows various examples, and you can follow him exactly to make some cool objects and animations: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjEaoINr3zgEq0u2MzVgAaHEBt--xLB6U
Blender Gui: There are many shortcuts or hot keys for a lot of buttons (i.e ctrl + z for undo, etc). It's good to start using these hot keys for most commonly used buttons, as they save a lot of time, are more convenient.
Top File menu: Used to open new/old project, or save existing work as *.blend. One important menu item is Defaults->load factory settings. This allows us to load all default settings, when you mess up some setting accidently.
Top Edit menu: Used for undo/redo. Very helpful to undo edits that happens by accident. Bottom menu item is "Preference" which is used to set many important settings for blender. Most important of these is "input" which allows to set mouse and keyboard settings. Tick Mark "emulate numpad" and "emulate 3 mouse button". This helps to emulate numpad keys on right side of keyboard and middle mouse button function for when we don't have middle mouse.
There are many more buttons on left and right.