Hosted by: Michael Ehling, SIG Leader
Last PACS season the WAM workshop had been planning to take a look at 3-D Animation using the free, open source Blender software. Instead, your Hapless Phacilitator (H.P., as in Harry Potter) got sidetracked on Google SketchUp, which is a lot easier (but much less powerful) than Blender. This season, though, having gotten our feet wet on 3-D design using SketchUp, we'll really and truly move on to Blender.
3-D design software like Autodesk Maya can cost several thousand dollars, and less expensive software like Electric Rain's Swift 3D can be difficult to learn because of the lack of good training books.
Blender, however, has it all, with free on-line support that includes a detailed FAQ page, a full Wiki Manual, and links to on-line support groups like the Blender Artists Forum. And a search of Amazon will show quite a number of training and reference books, including (at our basic level) The Essential Blender.
I originally had planned to use Blender for Dummies, but since they are in between editions, and the new edition won't be published for another year, I've decided to use The Essential Blender instead, which also comes with Version 2.44 of Blender.
Blender uses Python as its scripting language, so it can be helpful if you have Python correctly installed and configured in the version used by whatever Blender version you've installed. At our basic level, though, I don't think we're going to need any Python installation, so if you don't have Python it's really nothing to worry about.
One word of warning. If you're bringing a laptop with you to the WAM workshop, you may find that Blender is a little difficult to work with. It does require a good deal of processing power; and, even more importantly, it has some odd-ball input methods, which work best if you have a three-button (left, right, and middle) mouse as well as a numeric keypad. There are some work-arounds for using Blender on a laptop, but I'm not sure how successful they are.
You might want to bring a USB numeric keypad with you, but try to bring one with cable rather than a wireless connection. I don't know how strong the wireless signals are and how they might conflict with each other. If you do use a wireless USB keypad, you're doing so at your own risk of experiencing interference from someone who's also using wireless.
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We'll refer to The Essential Blender for working with Blender. Buy it from Amazon (and benefit PACS!): |
Buy the text for the software we covered last year, Google Sketchup, from Amazon (and benefit PACS!): |