Introduction into 3D creation in Blender

It is essential that you know what Blender is made of and how does it work. In some quick sentences I just want to give you a big picture of how does Blender work and what are the steps needed to create art in Blender.

There are 4 main steps to cover when creating a still image and another 2 if you want to make a movement animation like a movie. The 4 main steps for creating a still image are:

1. Modeling

This is the very first step when working in Blender. What modeling means is that you create the shape of the object that you want or if you like, you create it's geometry. In Blender and most similar softwares an object is created using: vertices, edges and faces. A vertice is a point in 3D space. An edge is a line between two vertices. And a face is made between 3 or more edges. There are three tipes of faces in Blender: a triangle is a face between three vertices, a quad face is a face between four vertices and a ngon(newer versions only) face is a face between five or more vertices.

 There are a few predefined shapes in Blender: cube, plane, circle, cylinder, cone, UV sphere, icosphere, torus and a monkey named Suzanne.

In the modeling process is also covered the sculpting, especially for organic characters.

2. Lighting

 In this step the lighting will be added to the scene using the 5 lamps in Blender: point, sun, spot, hemi and area lamp. In Cycles render there is one more lighting technique: a plane with an emission material. More to that there is a option called Ambient Occlusion that gives an environment lighting. Every lamp has some options that can be changed like strength or color and the ways that lighting can be used are vast.

3.Materials

In this step we make the objects look real. First time we will apply a texture to a material or a color. If no material is applied to a object it will have just a gray color. Applying a texture is sometimes not enough and a bump map need to be created and applied. A bump map accentuates some portions of the object. I will give you an example so you can understand what a bump map does. For example we have a fish can. If we apply a image texture to it it will look nice but if the can is stamped just applying a texture to it will make it look flat and non-realistic. The bump map does that and it makes the stamp look embossed.

4.Rendering

Rendering is the last step to create 3D art. This includes transforming the .blend file in a movie or image format. This step also includes post-processing and post-processing is done in Blender in the compositor. This step is crucial and this makes the difference between a photorealistic look of the picture or a animated look.




Those are the 4 basic steps when creating a still image but to make a animation there are 2 more steps to do(before rendering):

5. Rigging

In this step we create rigs or bones for the characters or objects. A bone is, like in the real life, the thing that makes possible the movement. Also bones will be applied for the mouth, the eyes, the cheeks, the forehead and maybe the ears. The bones for the face will make the character smile, laugh, blink, eat, be sad etc.

6.Animating

 Now that the rigging is done there is one more step to do and that is animating and this includes making the actual actions that the character or the object performs. This can be walking in the park and for this will be used the bones in the legs, hands and body or talking and for that the face bones will be used.