Project 2: Blender 3D Modelling
About Blender
Blender is the free and open-source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modelling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline.
Blender updates regularly. There are sometimes big changes between versions. We have Blender 3.3 installed at school. Tutorials for olders versions may have different ways of doing things.
If you want to use your own device you will need to install it from the blender site - https://www.blender.org/
Blender fundamentals 3.0 - Tutorials - Use these as a reference
blender cheatsheet.pdfActivity 1: Party Monkey
You will learn:
Zooming and rotating
Adding objects
Changing objects
Extension - Add a rim to the bottom of the monkey's hat
This tutorial uses Blender 2. The interface is quite different. You can import the monkey from:
Object > Add > Mesh > Monkey
Activity 2: Cube Trees
You will learn:
How to resize objects
Extension - Add on to the tree by adding more leaves (cubes) and branches or create a forest of different trees. This activity is good for getting you to memorise shortcut keys.
Activity 3: Rocket
You will learn:
Changing the number of vertices
How to use edit mode
How to sect edges & faces
How to Extrude along an axis (X,Y,Z)
How to colour an object and individual faces
Extension - Create your own version of a rocket or space ship and add colour.
Activity 4: Animating
You will learn:
How to animate a scene
1) Using what you have learnt so far creating a winter scene. That includes some trees, a house, a snowman and a snowball and colour them in.
2) Use the video tutorial to add in animation
Activity 5: Rendering
You will learn:
How to render in blender
1) Using the snowman animation, follow the tutorial to render the animation
Extension: Render the other models you have made as images or have a go and do some research on how to export them as 3D Models
Activity 6: Low Poly dinosaur
Follow this tutorial to recap what you have learnt in the previous tutorials but to create a more complex model.
Try and use as many shortcut keys as possible
Reference image - or find your own
Extension - Add an environment around the model, trees, mountains, etc.
Activity 7: Voxel 3D Illustration
Follow this mini-course to create a 3D illustration.
You will learn:
How to subdivide, extrude and loop
Materials and colour
Array modifier
Linking objects
Lighting set-up
Colour management and rendering
Extension: Add to the composition by making other plates, bottles etc.
Activity 8: Using a blueprint
To help with getting the sizing and proportions right for a model it can be very useful to use a blueprint or image as a reference image.
In this activity you will learn:
How to use a reference image
Adding a face
Practice skills taught in earlier tutorials, such as extrusion (e), scaling (s), selecting edge loop (Atl + left click), thickness and subdivisions.
Extension: experiment with lighting, materials (you could play around with glass), and creating a scene.
Activity 9: UV Editing
This is the process of skinning your 3D object into a 2D surface for texturing.
1) Have a go at adding an image texture to a monkey's head using the UV editor.
2) Record your work in your google slide
Activity - intro to the UV editor
More information on using UV unwrapping
Activity 10: Using Nodes
Blender's Node Editor lets you assemble various processing blocks (nodes) into combinations that feed data to one another along connections that you specify to produce complex effects. These effects can be used in three different ways: as textures, as materials, or for compositing.
1) Make the 3 textures demonstrated in the video.
2) Record your work in your google slide
Activity - Intro to using Nodes (3 textures)
Extension - Creating virtual doughnuts
Follow through the tutorials below to learn how to create a delicious- looking virtual doughnut.
Extension - 3D printing your model
If you are aiming to 3D print your model it needs to do more than look good, the geometry needs to be good too. This youTube clip explains the different issues that need to be addressed to get a printable model and introduces the 3D -Print toolbox.
These techniques are also helpful in tidying up a model that just isn't working right.