BTS 2020 Blender tutorial

let's start blending

Create a simple robotic animation in Blender

We will be using available models and materials to create an outdoor scene that includes nature elements and machines

Download latest Blender 2.90

Please go to : https://www.blender.org/download/releases/2-90/ and download the latest Blender version. Any Blender version will do for this tutorial, however things we will show work best for Blender >2.79.

Where to start?

Here is a great collection of tutorials that I strongly recommend if you want to learn more about Blender (for realz)

Blender Guru

Ducky 3D

CG Cookie

Lazy tutorials

What can help?

3D ASSETS

If you plan on blending something, you are probably not the first to come up with the idea! There are so many models available online, make us of this before you start...

There are a lot of models available in gazebo

ROS

Robot vendors love to provide 3D models of their products, check before you start!

Where can I find Robot 3D assets?

OK, what else?

It is always good to have a collection of textures ready to go!

HDRI

These textures are very good for modeling outdoor scenes.

Textures

Important to get realistic looking materials: metal, wood, plastic...

Enough!!! Just show me what I need for the Tutorial!

let's go!

UGV

Find a Husky model, and import it in Blender!

  • goto gazebosim.org and download the model

  • play with it to make it look good

  • add drivers to move it

  • no, you don't need to install drivers

Robot arm

We will play with Kinova 3gen arm

  • It is actually available online, however you need to turn it into a mesh file first

  • (don't worry I did it for you, here )

  • Let's rig the hand and apply inverse kinematics

  • Let's try to make it look good

What about some plant

Yes we can make a plant in blender. No not this plant.

  • Open sapling tree generator, its not good but it's good enough

  • Find some leaf and fruit textures and add them on the tree.

  • No need, just use the generated leafs from sapling tree generator

  • Multiply the plant

Outdoor scene

Light is the most important factor of outdoor scenes

  • Usually people did this with a combination of sun lamps in the scene

  • Now, people are lazy, we use HDRI images

  • Yes it looks better, but it can run couple of GB of memory on render

  • It will most certainly break your PC at some point, save your files

Can we put a flag here

Yes flags are nice

  • Sheldon loves flags

  • I really don't care about flags

  • But they teach us to simulate physics in Blender so let's make one anyway