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)
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