Blender - Open Source Computer Graphics

Perhaps it was the blessings of the YouTube algorithm, but for whatever reason I wanted to do some animation. I’ve never worked on computer graphics before but having now spent a week or so messing around in Blender, I have found it a lot of fun. I have learnt a few things along the way already:

1. Blender is not something to do after work when trying to relax (I’ve found it stimulates the brain and is also quite addictive - let’s try one more thing is quite a common thought),
2. Blender has an amazing community for beginners, YouTube tutorials are very easy to follow and the best place to start (learn the UI and pick up some shortcut keys),
3. CG artists are incredibly talented and I am certainly just a hobbyist beginner, having some fun,
4. If you’re dumb (like me) you’ll soon realise that Blender will try to perform any operation you ask of it - even if it totally destroys your hardware, thankfully the software is smart enough to just immediately crash.
5. Lighting and camera placement (and movement for animations) make or break a scene. Two areas (amongst many) I need to work on.

So far I’ve explored Blender’s:

• Particle simulation,
• Rigid body physics,
• Cloth physics and
• Fluid physics for liquids (water) and gas (smoke).

I am intrigued by the soft body physics and may have a play with that next.

In terms of Blender channels I recommend the following:

• Ian Hubert - his lazy tutorials are amusing and inspiring,
• Ducky 3D - I have found his tutorials easy to follow with satisfying rendered output,
• CGMatter and Default Cube - CGMatter presents short and entertaining tutorial videos, often experimenting with his presentation style (not a fan of his short stint of ASMR tutorials). His alternative channel Default Cube has a more educational focus with longer, more detailed (better explained) tutorials.
• … and many others …

And finally I have to mention Beeple. The artwork by this CG artist is awesome, and the style is something I’d like to emulate within Blender (he seems to use Cinema 4D most of the time).

Just for fun I’ll post a few Blender rendered images and animations here. Time pending, I plan to expand this out to longer animations which I think will be hosted on YouTube so that I can continue to host this website for free on GitHub (storing massive mpeg4 files may hit a storage cap on GitHub, I’m not sure, I haven’t looked into it yet).