ResPower Education Center: Blender, Part I - Rendering a Simple Scene

Overview

ResPower seeks to be an active member of the community of artists and programmers that develops and uses 3d software. To this end, we have decided to start a sort of journal through the process of learning each 3d application. These journals are intended to be a complete step-by-step record of the learning process for a person with no prior experience in the 3d computer graphics world. Each journal will build on the knowledge and experience gained in the previous journals, and will thus increase in complexity as time passes. This first journal will take you through the process of opening Blender, and modeling and rendering a very simple scene.

A Simple Scene

The first step is to start up Blender. I'll be using version 2.41 until further notice, and unless otherwise noted, all information here is pertinent to running Blender on Windows. If you don't have Blender, you can get it here.

Blender opens up a view from the top of a simple scene with a box, a light, and a camera. Every Blender scene requires a camera, some source of light, and, of course, some objects to actually look at. To get a very first render, just hit F12 to render the default scene. It should look very similar to the image on the left.

The render window gives you some important information. Things such as frame number, vertex and face count, and time to render are all placed in a menu bar at the top. Once your scene has rendered and you are done viewing it, you have a few options. The first is to close the window. This does exactly what you would expect and removes the window from the task bar. The second is to hit Esc. This causes the render window to remain open, but show up behind the main Blender interface. It can be helpful if you will need to view your render more than once, but you don't want to have to render it over and over again. The third option is to save the image. After you have rendered a scene, an option called "Save Image" appears in the menu under "File" in the Blender interface. Alternatively, you can hit F3 to bring up the save dialog. This dialog will try to save your frame with the extension you specify in the Render Settings. The default is Jpeg. We will discuss the Render Settings in greater detail later.

Organization

With just one simple object in your scene, keeping track of what's what is no issue. But as your scene grows in complexity it becomes of vital importance to be able to look at a list of names and be able to tell which name corresponds to which component of your scene. Blender has a fairly complex system for tracking components in a scene.

• Each Blender file has 1 or more scenes
• Each Scene has 0 or more objects
• Each Object has 1 or more meshes
• Each Mesh has 0 or more materials
• Each Material has 0 or more textures

At the bottom of the screen, you should see a panel with lots of buttons. Get used to looking at lots of little buttons in Blender because everything is custom built, which means no standard Windows buttons, dialogs, or anything else. Make sure that your cube object is selected. The object will be outlined in pink in the 3d view window if it is selected. If it is not selected, right-click on the cube so that it is. Now look back down at the bottom and find the button with the tooltip that says "Editing" or just press F9. The button is pictured to the right.

In the editing pane, the far left panel is the "Link and Materials" panel. Right now, it should look very similar to the picture at the left. The left text box in this panel says "ME:Cube". This means that the object you have selected has a mesh with the name "Cube" assigned to it. The right text box in this panel says "OB:Cube". This means that the object you have selected is an object with the name "Cube" assigned to it. To change the text in these boxes, simply click inside each one, delete what is there, and type something appropriate. I am going to name my mesh "me_puppy" and my object "ob_puppy". The names you pick are entirely up to you, but it is helpful to have a standard naming system for easy identification in the future. Some choose to name meshes "me_whatever", objects "ob_whatever", materials "ma_whatever", textures "te_whatever", and scenes "sc_whatever", but the choice is yours. To the right is the finished product of renaming the cube's mesh and object.

Conclusion

This has been an admittedly simple introduction to Blender. There is nothing in this journal entry that your average individual could not figure out with a few minutes of experimentation with Blender, but this provides a base on which to build with future entries. Thanks for reading, and check back for new entries very soon.

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