Blender (Help and Suggestion)

[Mr Silver]

I recently downloaded Blender after hearing some good things about the program, trouble is I don't know exactly how to use it, I'm a pretty quick study and i've seen people do some awesome things with it

I'm just wonder if anyone would be kind enough to maybe post some generic starship formulas or a quick tutorial on how to form such designs, thanks in advance for any help you can provide

 

[Science Officer]

I recently downloaded Blender after hearing some good things about the program, trouble is I don't know exactly how to use it, I'm a pretty quick study and i've seen people do some awesome things with it

I'm just wonder if anyone would be kind enough to maybe post some generic starship formulas or a quick tutorial on how to form such designs, thanks in advance for any help you can provide

I've had a quick go with it and I find it nearly impossible to use. The UI is the least intuitive I've ever come across, which is the reason why I stick with my good old v8.2 of C4D and live with a few less features. I think I've just developed a nervous tick just thinking about it!

A good starting point would probably be to find some decent plans for starships and project them onto planes. A ship like the TOS Enterprise might be good project as its geometry is relatively simple.

Cheers,
S.O.

 

[Mr Silver]

A good starting point would probably be to find some decent plans for starships and project them onto planes. A ship like the TOS Enterprise might be good project as its geometry is relatively simple.

Thanks for the advice, but I don't actually know how to even do this

 

[Science Officer]

A good starting point would probably be to find some decent plans for starships and project them onto planes. A ship like the TOS Enterprise might be good project as its geometry is relatively simple.

Thanks for the advice, but I don't actually know how to even do this

What you would be aiming for is something like this...

In this case I took the bitmaps of the Foundation Imaging Enterprise (from the Drex Files site) and textured them onto three plane objects.

Create three objects and adjust the width and height to matching the aspect ratio of your bitmaps. So if you have a 1000x500 pixel bitmap, create a 1000x500m plane. Set each to the required x, y and z axes.

Create a texture and load the bitmap into the textures luminosity channel. Switch off all other channels. Then attach the texture to the object. Do this for each object. You might need to change the mapping to UVW or flat projection.

Depending on the quality of the bitmaps, you may need to tweak their positions and sizes until everything aligns correctly.

Now I can't explain how to do this in Blender for reasons of maintaining my sanity. But it would be a good start in creating basic objects, moving, rotating and scaling, and texturing them.

Time to dig out that Blender manual. Hope this helps.

S.O.

 

[Dac]

Get SketchUp. Not an especially powerful program, but I find its UI much more friendly at first glance.

Plus theres a tonne of tutorials on the site.

http://sketchup.google.com/intl/en/

 

[Tallguy]

Depends on what you want to do. Sketchup is a really cool program that can do some amazing stuff and its initial learning curve is very shallow. But it is (I think) strictly a modeling program.

Blender has a steeper (heh - like a wall) learning curve. But you can make movies with it.

Blender is in a serious state of change right now. 2.5 is the future but it isn't QUITE done yet (still in beta). There are a lot of tutorials for 2.4 and under and a surprising amount for 2.5. I think I'd probably suggest diving in with 2.5 since you won't know what you're missing yet.

http://blendernewbies.blogspot.com/ is a good start. blenderguru.com might not be as beginner friendly.

Jump in, that water's in 3D!

 

[BK613]

Another useful site, at least for me, was

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro

And I tend to agree with S.O, there nothing very intuitive about Blender's interface.

 

[Science Officer]

Hi CaptainM,

Of course we're not trying to put you off Blender! I'd probably be using it myself if I wasn't so lucky at buying C4D in the days when you could get it off a computer magazine CD and upgrade for a good price.

If you can master that poor excuse for a user interface, keyboard shortcuts and mouse, you should be able to do some very tidy work and render it to a high quality. You only have to look at the projects MadMan has done to see that.

If the learning curve does concern you, you could use another application for modelling, export to a common format (OBJ) and then render in Blender.

Cheers,
S.O.

 

[Itisnotlogical]

Blender is about the most useful free program that I've seen. It has a lot of awesome features like particle/fluid simulation, UV mapping, and even an in-house game engine. Google Sketchup is mostly good for inanimate objects with simple geometry... in other words, totally useless in my opinion.

Also, don't listen to all these people dissing on the UI. It just takes a week or so of practice to know where most of the important stuff is. But if the learning curve is really THAT HARD, Anim8r is the second-best free program that I've seen.

 

[Psion]

Captain M (and any other interested parties), go to BlenderCookie to learn almost everything you need to know about Blender 2.5+. Pay particular attention to tutorials by Jonathan Williamson or David Ward. Note that the tutorials are largely organized by date, but if you select Williamson or Ward from the tag cloud and look through the results you'll see a number of introductory videos.

Also, get yourself an account with Blender Artists and dig through their forum. The Works-in-progress section is particularly inspiring. You'll see lots of people asking questions and making dumb mistakes (seeing an artist whose work you admire make a dumb mistake is inspirational -- it reminds you that they're human too and you've got a shot at equaling or surpassing their work).

Finally, ask here. There are a number of folks that use Blender here and some of us are even willing to lend a hand guiding you to success.

Since you're new to Blender, stay away from any pre-2.5 version. Don't waste the time learning the old interface. 2.5 is nearing completion and most of the features are operational and stable. I use it for almost all of my work.

 

[MadMan1701A]

Hey, I guess it's my turn.

I think I'm in the minority when it comes to the user interface in 2.5... I absolutely hate it. I've tried it every time a new build comes out, and I don't like the way they merged all of the workspaces into one by default... I know I can tweak it, but I liked it better the old way.

I've got some stuff on my page; the textbook at the bottom I thought was pretty good, when I was starting out. It's for version 2.42a, but alot of that stuff is very similar all the way through 2.49

www.madshipyard.com/tutorials.htm

And, like Psion said, ask questions. We'll always answer. Whether or not the answer is good or not, is another story.

 

[Mr Silver]

Thanks for all the advice so far guys!

 

[Tallguy]

Thanks for all the advice so far guys!

We'll be looking forward to seeing your first screen-accurate Enterprise (any era) no later than January.

 

[Patrickivan]

As a google SU user, I will be the first to admit that there are limits. But it really depends on what you want to do. It's very fun and simple to use, and I've been able to get some decent models out of it.

Though there is much that I'd like to do, but can't. (sigh)

 

[BillJ]

Blender makes me cry.

 

[Mr Silver]

We'll be looking forward to seeing your first screen-accurate Enterprise (any era) no later than January.

Thanks for the vote of confidence, but its gonna take a lot longer than that!

Yeah Blender's UI is pretty bad, I've checked out Mad Man's guides, however even though they are resonably staightforward, in terms of understanding, the UI still leads me to ultimate confusion, is there anything like Blender (openware) that has a simpler interface and can do more or less the same?

 

[Itisnotlogical]

Negative. Blender is the only high-quality freeware CG engine out there that I know of.

 

[Nascence]

I have been learning Blender in pieces for about a month, now.
I am using ver. 2.4. All I can say is that the UI gets easier to use and understand with practice.
I am learning this program using a great tutorial book called
"Blender for Dummies".
If you know next to nothing about creating 3D models or CGI, this book will help tremendously.
The book was more than worth the $30 I paid for this.
My advice, sign up at one or more of the Blender user forums. These forums are great and there are a lot of Blender users that are part of these forums that can help with any questions you have with Blender. I am registered at 3 different Blender user forums.
These sites are indispensable..
Also, before you even try and attempt to model starships, you really need some sort of tutorial book and create the examples shown in the book.
This will get you more comfortable with the Blender UI and Blender/3d modeling terminology.
Learning Blender with no experience or some sort of help guide is no fun for anyone.
Blender is a free open source program that has no equal as far as it's a truly powerful modeling, animating and movie-making software tool.
I say give it a real shot and effort before deciding to ditch it.
If you've used no other modeling program, you really have nothing to compare it to. Plus, I feel if you can command this program, you can, probably, more easily learn any other 3D modeling program after